To enter a theatre for a performance is to be inducted into a magical space, to be ushered into the sacred arena of the imagination.

Having caught a glimpse of what I might be able to do with my talent, I feel a tremendous obligation to try to fulfill it.

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

Everything that we have gone through, are going through, and will go through is there in Shakespeare. It is all of human life.

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.

When the BBC decided to bring Doctor Who back as a feature film a few years ago, one national newspaper ran a poll to ask its readers who should be the new Doctor, and I topped it.

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.