“When I told my mother that I wanted to be an actress, she said, you can’t live here and do that, and so I moved out. I was determined to prove her wrong because she was so sure that I was going to go astray. And that’s the juice that kept me going.”

The gratification comes, for me, in the doing of it. And once I’ve done it, I can’t do anything about it if it’s good or if it’s bad.

I didn’t want to be an actress; I never thought of being an actress because, as children, there were three of us – I was the middle child – and we spent our time in church from Sunday morning to Saturday night.

One of the things I have always said about the man-woman relationship is that I don’t want anybody to walk ahead of me, and I don’t want anybody to walk behind me. I want a man who will walk along beside me. And that’s how I feel about equal rights.

You never know what motivates you.

I think when you begin to think of yourself as having achieved something, then there’s nothing left for you to work towards. I want to believe that there is a mountain so high that I will spend my entire life striving to reach the top of it.

In my early years, there were a number of experiences that made me decide I could not afford the luxury of just being an actress. There were a number of issues I wanted to address. And I wanted to use my career as a platform.

Unless a piece really said something, I had no interest in it. I have got to know that I have served some purpose here.

Now, I am perfectly willing to just enjoy my career by choosing roles simply because I consider them to be a challenge and doing the best possible job I can.

My mother was an introvert and quite religious. And we were brought up in the church. And when she learned that I wanted to act, she simply said: ‘You cannot live here and do that.’

How do you project a character if you don’t have a sense of where she is from? I’ve always just gotten on a plane to go to the area to get a sense of what it is like, to smell it, feel the earth, hear people talk, go to the marketplaces.

One lady told me that before she saw ‘Sounder’ she didn’t believe black people could love each other, have deep relationships in the same way as white people.

We have to support our own films. If we don’t, how can we expect others to support them?

I feel so guilty about the state of young people today. And I say that because our generation fought for everything. We fought to sit down at a counter, to sit on a bus. They were left with nothing to fight for.

My gratification in working comes from the preparation and the building of the character.

I don’t think you can measure wealth in dollars and cents. I really don’t believe that at all because there are some things that money cannot buy. One of them is health. And the other is security in your relationships and friends.

The choices of roles I made had to do with educating and entertaining. And as a result I found myself working only every two or three years.

I trained for three years at drama school to be an actor – not a celebrity.

The actors that I do know are people who I think have souls, you know?

It’s just people should realize that the celebrity aspect of being an actor is very rarely enjoyable for people like me who would always rather go unnoticed and disappear into the crowd.

I wanted to be a stage actress. I wanted to be a New York actress and have a community with other actors. I didn’t want to get famous; I always thought getting famous was a drag on you.

More than an actor, I am a performer. I’m a great believer – honestly so, shamelessly so, vulgarly so – that cinema is for entertainment. If you want to send messages, there’s the postal service.

As an actor, you create a character from your understanding of what you have heard and your observations. Eventually, every film is an extension of the images that I have seen or what I have heard or read somewhere.

The better the actor, the more stupid he is.

Most of the top actors and actresses may be working in ten or twelve films at the same time, so they will give one director two hours and maybe shoot in Bombay in the morning and Madras in the evening. It happens.