“An M.P. once suggested I be put in the Tower of London for saying derogatory things about the royals. There’s no First Amendment in my country.”
“The working classes in England were always sentimental, and the Irish and Scots and Welsh. The upper-class English are the stiff-upper-lipped ones. And the middle class. They’re the ones who are crippled emotionally because they can’t move up, and they’re desperate not to move down.”
“I don’t see myself as a stand-up comic doing cynical, mean-spirited or disrespectful stuff. I’m very aware that I don’t like to disrespect people too much.”
“I’ve always been a misfit.”
“As you get older, you realize it’s work. It’s that fine line between love and companionship. But passionate love? I’d love to know how to make that last.”
“As I get older, I just prefer to knit.”
“Every character I do is based on someone I know.”
“I don’t get very involved in the L.A. scene. When you do get invited out, you are expected to be on all the time. It’s just wearying.”
“I hate clowns.”
“I hope I never get so hard up I have to do advertisements. I’ve gotten ridiculous offers.”
“I like going to France, because no one knows who I am.”
“I like infomercials.”
“I love John Waters. There’s stuff in it that’s beyond the boundaries of my taste, but his movies have always been like that.”
“I loved the late Gilda Radner. I love Carol Burnett and Lily Tomlin.”
“I never wanted to do political satire because it seems too surface to me.”
“I think serial monogamy says it all.”
“I used to dress up and impersonate our next-door neighbor, Miss Cox. She wore rubber boots, a wool hat, and her nose always dripped.”
“I wish I could believe that one person could make a difference.”
“I worked with Paul McCartney for a while and saw what it does to you to be treated like a god for twenty years.”
“I’m as famous as I want to be.”
“I’m not a crazy, party-going sort of person.”
“I’m still that little girl who lisped and sat in the back of the car and threw vegetables at the back of her head when we drove home from the market. That never goes.”
“I’m usually put off by performers when they get political.”
“I’ve never looked ahead very much in my life. I’ve never had any grand plan from the outset. I had no burning ambition to do what I do.”
“It makes you more open, it gives you perspective, having a child.”
“It’s funny – if you impersonate somebody, they have no idea it’s them.”
“It’s sometimes shocking to find out what people really believe in.”
“It’s the poignancy and sadness in things that gets to me.”
“My influences were Peter Sellers and the great British character actors.”
“The show I did in England catered to a broad range of people. I like that. I don’t want nouveau cult status, though I know we’ve got that sort of audience in the states.”
“There are different types of love, and my love for my child is like me and my mum. We’ve gone through a lot of rocky patches, but we never stop loving.”
“Why does everyone think the future is space helmets, silver foil, and talking like computers, like a bad episode of Star Trek?”
“Work is important to me. I want to do things for principle, not just for the sake of doing them.”
“You become so encapsulated in this world of being a star. People listen to what you say, you have this voice, it becomes unreal and you become far removed from the people you came from.”
“I became an American in 2006. It got me thinking about what is my America and what’s my perception of America.”
“I’m fascinated by Bollywood.”
“I’ve always gotten a positive reaction to doing African-American characters.”
“I’m sick of environmentalism.”
“I just love to impersonate people, and I impersonate people because I find them fascinating.”
“I’ve always had to create my own markets and I’ve always been at a juncture in my career.”
“I just want to do good work.”
“I’m not a film snob.”
“It’s like a woman’s birthright to knit. It’s primal. It’s timeless. You don’t need electricity to knit. You can do it with a candle, girls!”
“There’s nothing I won’t attempt.”
“I never worked with a dialogue coach before, but I’d hate it if an American did a British accent and didn’t do it well. It would be insulting.”
“My mum would like to see me on the cover of ‘Good Housekeeping’ demonstrating children’s toys with some nice lipstick on.”
“Great pressure is put on kids who don’t have dads to get out and make money, and make life easier for everybody. It was always, ‘Hurry up, grow up, make money, there’s no man to do it for us.’”
“I love documentaries, I like observing real people.”
“A lot of stand-up comedy is embarrassing: too many idiots doing it in orange neckties against brick walls. I find most sitcoms embarrassing, too, because they seem so forced.”
“I grew up with Jilly and Tamsin driving Volvos. But I wasn’t one of them… I always felt more comfortable with Cockney and working-class people. My heroes were the Beatles and people like Michael Caine.”
“There were no examples of girls like myself becoming successful actresses. To be an actress in England was a serious, upper-middle class girl’s profession. I just thought I would never be accepted unless I pretended to become somebody I wasn’t.”
“I like being the odd one out in L.A. Because if you conform, you become something you hate. I love being the odd one out. It’s not about ‘Look at me! Look at me!’ It’s about really becoming someone else.”
Leave a Reply