The great writers like Chekhov know that tragedy and laughter are just a few steps from each other ... but it took me a long time as an actress to learn that. Actually Arthur Miller taught me in the Seventies. We were making a CBS TV drama of his play Playing for Time about Auschwitz but the characters were laughing. It was a big insight for me to realise that that was what's called gallows humour, in this case worse than the gallows, that humans need to laugh and make jokes in order to survive.

Shakespeare lets us see real people undergoing real processes, with real feelings

The society Shakespeare knew was heading for tremendous change, and he seems to have recognized that and written about it in a coded way. I understand those codes, I think

What a script says that isn't dialogue is as important as the spoken word.

One must never comment as an actor, never show that a character is shallow or vindictive, but let that be conveyed. I mean, none of us thinks of ourselves as being vindictive or shallow - perhaps we should.

We will always want films ... that basically are centred on young people, because young people is the way we live on, we older people, insofar as we live on.

A theater is being given over to market forces, which means that a whole generation that should be able to do theater as well as see it is being completely deprived