“Everyone wants instant everything, and they want instant success, but I always think you should treat things in the arts like a garden, and let them grow.”
“I plant a lot of trees. I am a great believer in planting things for future generations. I loathe the now culture where you just live for today.”
“Shyness is just egoism out of its depth.”
“Older people, who just happen to have been around longer, may not be cleverer than the young, but they have seen more.”
“We always had chocolates and my mother was careful to make sure they were unwrapped in advance so the paper wouldn’t rustle in the middle of a performance.”
“The character I play in Star Quality says acting is the be-all and end-all of her life. I’m not like that. I do enjoy working and I give every job my best shot but I never feel, What on Earth am I going to do now?”
“I think I’m a better actress for having friends and interests outside the theatre. I wouldn’t want to live my life surrounded by other actors all the time.”
“Young people don’t want to sit at home and watch television; they’d sooner be out doing their own thing.”
“In my book, all manners are is thinking of somebody else.”
“In this great age of communication, there a lot of people you can’t actually understand. I know everyone tweets, and twits and texts and all that, but actually we’ve all got voices, and it is awfully nice to hear them and if you can understand what people are saying.”
“I love touring, I really do.”
“I don’t think actors ever retire, they just stop being asked to work.”
“So often actors only mix with actors, which is quite incestuous, and doesn’t give them the insight into how other people work.”
“With a play, you do it and it’s gone. Films always date. Television drama always dates. Television comedy, for some reason, seems to go on.”
“I’m a bit of a Scotophile. I have a house on the Black Isle, so I’m in Scotland quite a lot and think Edinburgh is just the most beautiful city.”
“I always used to say when I was on television that I prefer to be on stage and when on stage I prefer to do television. Typical human condition.”
“I’m sure that is a reason why young people occasionally bash up old people – because the ages don’t mix any more.”
“I think it is very sad that ‘sitcom’ has become a pejorative term.”
“A lot of people have it – that fantasy of being lord or lady of the manor, either in the present or at some time in history.”
“I’m a realist.”
“I don’t feel ‘vibes’ when I enter a building – don’t feel the previous owners looking down on me. But I do know when a place feels friendly.”
“Language is my bugbear. Everyone says things now like ‘I was sat’ instead of ‘I was sitting’, which just sounds so ugly.”
“I’m not against accents – my husband’s from Lancashire and has a rural Lancs accent. We’ve just got back from Scotland yesterday, and I love that Highland burr.”
“I don’t believe in public humiliation. It went out with the stocks.”
“We have this wonderful language and we don’t appreciate it. That’s old-fashioned me, but when I went to school, everyone had elocution lessons, not to sound posh but so you could be understood.”
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