“When ‘Jewel’ was screened, old friends from school and university got back in touch. More than one of them told me that their partners hated Merrick so much they could not think of having me in the house. This kind of audience identification does not happen in any other medium.”
“I have only met Prince Charles once, when he was very charming and easy to chat to. I have always had a soft spot for him, and I admire our constitutional monarchy, but Charles often comes across as eccentric, and he has a mixed press.”
“My first arrival in India was memorable – landing at Delhi airport at 2 A.M. to start filming ‘The Jewel in the Crown’ in the Eighties. The man who was supposed to pick me up wasn’t there, so I spent a very uncomfortable three hours phoning around hotels to find out where I was supposed to be. It was a major culture shock, but I adored India.”
“If you can’t educate your citizens and you can’t keep them healthy, you can’t begin to be a society.”
“Slower television actually credits the audience with a higher level of intelligence.”
“For sheer excitement, a weekend in New York is unbeatable. Arrive on Friday morning, leave on Monday night, and don’t worry about jet lag – just buzz for four days.”
“You had to be there at the time to understand the wild creative energy of the Fab Four, and this contains forays into Indian music as well as classics such as ‘When I’m Sixty-Four.’”
“Hollywood’s best producers and directors are in film, not TV.”
“I’ve played quite a lot of real people, and it carries a special responsibility.”
“America is very generous, but it’s also a bit wacky, you know.”
“I always remember to go on the Staten Island Ferry because it’s the most amazing view of New York. And it’s free! You see Ellis Island, and it conjures up something of that great moment: you know, the huddled masses yearning to breathe free. It’s staggering.”
“In England, anybody who was alive remembers an interview between the press and Charles and Diana, right after they became engaged. One of the press asked Charles if he loved her. And he said, ‘Oh, well, whatever love means.’ Boy, it was a terrible answer.”
“The worst nickname I ever had was Tim Pig-ears-Smith. I had big ears. When I was younger, it was more pronounced. So I felt huge sympathy towards Prince Charles over that.”
“What a wonderful life I’ve had – absolutely amazing.”
“You never learn to act in front of a camera. You never learn anything in front of a camera. But you learn to act in a rehearsal room with a good play and a good cast and a good director.”
“You wouldn’t read ‘Anna Karenina’ and try to work on the computer at the same time, would you?”
“It’s not legally possible to put an image of a member of the royal family on the Tube!”
“As a child, we lived in flats, and I was never allowed pets.”
“The Almeida’s artistic director, Rupert Goold, brought me Mike Bartlett’s ‘King Charles III’ with the slightly apologetic warning that it was in blank verse, but, of course, that appealed to me.”
“By early 1971, I had been acting professionally for 18 months – theatre work and my first telly, an episode of ‘Dr. Who.’”
“After a West End run, in which I was promoted to Laertes, I joined the RSC in 1972. I had fulfilled my dream.”
“People wrote about me and started calling me a star, and I just hated it. There are aspects of it that are great – I mean, you can ring up any restaurant and get in, can’t you.”
“When I have a good performance, I’m wrecked at the end of it. I feel completely empty, and tears are pouring down my face – I’m just gone.”
“I seem to get cast as one of two extremes. Either I play the butch heavy or totally nice guys.”
“Of course there is a danger of typecasting, and since ‘Jewel in the Crown’ appeared, I have had countless offers to play sadistic policemen and middle-class misfits.”
“I didn’t like my first primary school in Leicester very much. As I was going home on my tricycle one day, I said, ‘There’s no reading, no writing and no arithmetic – it’s really boring!’ So I was sent to St John the Baptist Church of England Primary.”
“I’m quite sharp but not particularly academic.”
“Your response to literature is to do with maturity; if you don’t respond to a book or a poem when you are 12, you might when you are 13.”
“Drama at Bristol was an academic course: you were judged on your A-levels, and there were no auditions. I did a BA General degree.”
“Performing King Charles in Mike Bartlett’s astonishing play in London and New York has been one of the high points of my career.”
“After ‘Jewel In the Crown,’ I hardly worked at all for about six months – which came as a bit of a surprise, I have to admit.”
“Villains are always the best roles, but that meant that for months afterwards, all I got offered were absolute cads and bounders and really nasty pieces of work, as well as a lot of people who only had one arm. Such is the limited imaginative power, you see, of a great many casting directors.”
“One of the functions of drama is to teach.”
“When you’ve won the war, you’re faced with the problem of winning the peace.”
“I used to think the actor’s job was immersing himself completely in another personality.”
“The ‘reality’ shows on television, the Internet, these things have encouraged people to behave with less and less restraint. We are broadcasting our emotions in public in a way that has never happened before.”
“When I grew up, in the time of ‘Look Back in Anger,’ the theatre was very exciting, a place where you felt that social comment could lead to social change.”
“I especially like the Padstow area and the south coast near Portloe. It’s lovely, though I do wish it was a bit closer to London.”
“My wife is a fantastic traveller. She’s good fun and very optimistic. Even if things get bad, she’s good at seeing the light side.”
“I’m not a big fan of the Mediterranean, but being in the Bay of Biscay, the sea is forever changing, and on a clear day, you see as far as Spain. It’s incomparable.”
“I adore Biarritz. I first went there in the Eighties, and my wife and I liked it so much that we ended up buying a holiday home there.”
“What makes Biarritz special, as far as I’m concerned, are the fantastic coastline, the beaches – such as the Cotes des Basques – and the sea.”
“I like songs to mean something as well as sound good, and Paul Simon is a maestro. While Art Garfunkel was a voice and moved on to other things Simon remained the genius lyricist and composer.”
“I love Stevie Wonder for his sense of rapture in the music. He can swing through a zappy tune, lift your heart, or drift into a sad ballad with consummate ease.”
“I like jazz, and Martin Taylor and his band have it all, including a wonderful saxophonist and very fine accordionist, so you get a rather unusual range of sound.”
“I was really uncomfortable with fame. I mean, it’s lovely and flattering, and you enjoy all the razzmatazz and being flown around, but when people suddenly call you a star, you think, ‘I’m not a star, I’m just playing a star role.’”
“My memory is quite good, except when I’m off stage.”
“My parents were fantastic. I was an only child, so I had a lot of love and too much attention. I don’t think I was spoilt. My mother was quite a disciplinarian, but I did have a lot of attention and quite a lot of pressure to do well at whatever I was doing.”
“When you’re in a good play and a good production, you find that you’re in something that has a life beyond you. You think, ‘Oh my goodness, this play’s alive.’”
“When I was 16, we moved to live in Stratford-Upon-Avon. That was the year of Paul Scofield’s ‘Lear.’ I think he is still widely perceived as the only actor who has got his flag at the top of the mountain.”
“You normally either get bitten by a character and decide that is the way to play it, and then that begins to inform everything you do, or you decide, ‘I don’t need to use much character in this – I have basically got to be me’.”
“I would say that the money that was invested in me by Warwickshire Education Authority, which they did for five years, has been repaid a hundred times over. I have paid a lot more back to them in tax than they paid in support to me, but they helped me on my way – they launched me; they got me going.”
“’Jewel in the Crown’ is the biggest exposure I’ve ever had on television.”
“You can’t keep a hero down, can you?”
“In television, I was first cast as a cavalry officer because of my name.”
“When I get thinking, I get very knotted up. I chew things over a lot and take things quite seriously.”
“Occasionally, there are programmes – like ‘The Office’ or ‘Gavin and Stacey,’ perhaps – where you get the feeling everybody’s seen it.”
“There is something about the way I photograph. People often say, ‘Are you cross with me?’ My eyes can look sort of… like a wall.”
“I never wanted to do film. I don’t have the right face, and I don’t like stardom. I like the fact that I have this wonderful thing that gives you status, but I’m most interested in doing decent work.”
“Fame changed my life completely because, for a while, I was in a position to choose what I did. I miss that aspect. But I always felt uncomfortable with it.”
“Sometimes I Rollerblade to work, but it’s most lovely in the park, and it’s really quite safe there. I do it quite carefully, and I wear all the gear.”
“Everybody wants a movie career. I found that pretty elusive. I did make a movie with Martin Sheen about a nuclear scientist who has a religious experience. I don’t even know what it was called. I don’t think it was ever released.”
“I earn a lot of money in England doing voice-overs, especially in documentaries. Turn on the Discovery Channel here, and you’ll hear my voice a lot. It subsidizes my vice of acting in the theater.”
“American writers reduce the length of time devoted to exposition and character development.”
“Perhaps it’s an accident of nationality, but the English treasure subtlety and appreciate not having everything spelled out for them, while Americans want everything made apparent.”
“Understand me, Hollywood miniseries are very popular in England. But British miniseries make a tremendous mark on the national consciousness. They become part of the national culture and mythology… at least for a time.”
“I can’t understand why TV tries to appeal to youth.”
“People are fed up with broadcasters pushing the boundaries too far.”
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