“Some actors come to the set ready to do their parts a certain way.”

If you’re going to make a film, you have to try to make sure it comes out of a childlike passion, as if you’re doing it for the first time.

Directors have a tendency to use their hands like orchestra conductors.

They don’t realize that the actor is looking at their faces, anyway.

I like trying to do things which work on many levels, because I think it is terribly important to give an audience a lot of things they might not get as well as those they will.

So that finally the film does take on a texture and is not just simplistic communication.

I am oblique; I think that has to do with my own nature.

I’ve hardly had an avant-garde career.

I think people will be curious to see what I can do as a dramatic actor.

Keats himself spoke about how Shakespeare was capable of erasing himself completely from the characters he had created. As an actor, that is what I’m trying to do.

When I finished my A-levels, I assumed I’d be able to get work as an actor. But I couldn’t. I didn’t get an audition. Nothing. So I thought I’d better train and then the parts would come.

I had the privilege of being able to choose, or at least have the opportunity to work at, being anything but an actor.

I told myself that I would not go back to the camps as an actor ever again, that I was very frightened of wearing a yellow star. It was fear, it was cowardice, I was.

Fifteen years before I became a screen actor, I was in the theatre. A lot of my work was comedy, which I loved doing. It’s harder.

I don’t want to be like the actor who rehearses everything in the bathroom, then comes to the set and carries on completely uninterrupted while the other actors tiptoe away.

Actors were exploited no less by the capitalist managers than they were by the state.