I tend to arrive in the rehearsal process with very strongly developed ideas about what I want to do. But I don't like those ideas to be things that are not subject to change, or subject to development, or subject to challenge.

In my early years, my father was away as a soldier in the war. When he came back, work was very difficult to come by. Even though he was a highly skilled man, a maker of furniture, the payment for that work was very poor.

I had a feeling about Shakespeare's soliloquies, that there should be a real exchange between the actor and the audience.

The first big break was winning a scholarship to go to Cambridge University. I was very lucky, because my parents couldn't have afforded a university education for me. Without a scholarship I couldn't possibly have gone.

In the commercial theater, I've been pretty fortunate. The producers that I've worked with have allowed me to define the artistic integrity, the artistic limits of the work.

In a way, I have to have a dictatorship. I can't be told that I'm wrong. That conflicts with what I was saying earlier about listening. It isn't to do with receiving criticism and responding to other views, it's who has that last decision.

When I was 13 years old, a professional theater company in my town needed a kid actor. I auditioned, and I got the part, so for just a few weeks I became a member of the company and I met some professional actors.