Increasingly I've come to think that what's at the core of acting is thinking. Most people would say it's feeling.

The elderly are all someone's flesh and blood and we cannot just shut them in a cupboard and hand over the responsibility for taking care of them to the state.

Shakespeare speaks for the human heart but Dickens speaks for the social man and for injustices.

To live another person's life is quite a weird thing.

You could say Shakespeare is so extraordinary precisely because he was so ordinary. He had all the usual anxieties and understandings of what it is to have children, lose children, get married, struggle to make a living and so on.

My mother wanted me to be a teacher. She had this vision of me walking across the quadrangle in an Oxford college wearing my academic gown.

Shakespeare wrote all there is that we need to know about dementia in 'King Lear.