On one occasion, Daniel Day-Lewis, Jeremy Irons and myself were due to appear at the Sarajevo film festival and were turned off a UN plane on orders from Geneva. We had to get local journalists to transport the films in for us. I tell you this only to demonstrate that festivals can be a lifeline. But, after all the difficulties I'd had in getting there, in 1996 I found myself being flown in on a four-seater RAF plane as an official guest, endorsed by the British Embassy. Ironically, the film I was to present was Mission: Impossible.

Theater and poetry were what helped people stay alive and want to go on living.

As a mother you have got to have a view for now and a view for the future.

I was surprised when I was asked to play Miss Daisy and wondered if I could - only in part because she was Jewish but, also because she was a Southern woman who has hardly opened her mouth before she declares she's not prejudiced, and yet everything she does shows how totally prejudiced she is.

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.

Theater helps people keep sane.

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.