“To be serious, the things you really want to relive are things like bedtime with your daughter when she becomes incredibly entertaining ’cause she doesn’t want to go to sleep.”

I learned far too late in life that a long list of letters after someone’s name is no guarantee of compassion, kindness, humour, all the far more relevant stuff.

Anti-Semitism and Fascism have a long, mysterious, bewildering, poisonous and vile history and it’s not exclusive to the Germans.

I don’t spend a lot of time with anybody.

Actors always talk about taking their work home and I always think: ‘What are you on? You just turn it off. You are at work and then you go home.’

I’m not famous for my back story investigations; I’m lucky that I work with good writers and it’s usually in the script.

I’m one of those weird people who doesn’t even own a computer.

Try to be in the day. Try to not have today stolen from you by anxiety about yesterday or tomorrow.”

Anyone who can do the splits and come back up on the backbeat, as James Brown and Prince can, has my eternal respect.

As you get older you feel you need to pay more attention to what is around you and relish it. I’m greedy for beauty.

I used to joke that one of the reasons there was a lack of classical work on my CV was because I couldn’t operate in those kinds of trousers. Which is a joke, but it’s actually also true – if I want to appear in public I want to look my best.

I don’t even own a car.

I did pick up a guitar once, but the strings hurt my fingers so I put it down again.

I love playing half squid/half crab guy because you can get away with a level of acting that if you tried it anywhere else they’d arrest you for crimes against acting.

I wanted to be a journalist, I thought it was glamorous and that I’d meet beautiful women in the rain.

In one way, an attempt to reproduce the way people actually speak, but it’s not just an attempt at naturalism. It’s stylised and it’s heightened, to great effect. It’s elegant and it’s funny and that’s the way to my heart, frankly.

Whatever you do, don’t smoke’. I have had to recover from that and been lucky that I have been able to stop.

Our personalities seem dangerously to blur and overlap with our mother’s; and, in a desperate attempt to know where mother ends and daughter begins, we perform radical surgery.

Mothers and daughters have always exchanged with each other – beyond the verbally transmitted lore of female survival.

We are, none of us, ‘either’ mothers or daughters; to our amazement, confusion, and greater complexity, we are both.

It is the lesbian in us who is creative, for the dutiful daughter of the fathers in us is only a hack.

If one day I have a daughter and my daughter wants to be a model, I would never let her!

What’s important for me is to give my daughters a well-rounded education and a mixture of people in their lives. They’ll make their own choices. I think they would be good in show business.

I have three girls, and I say the same thing to them. I’m not involved in their careers because I’ve learned that it’s important for them to stand on their own two feet. They’ll feel better and prouder of themselves if they do.

My understanding of busy has certainly changed! My daughters have had an incredible impact on my life and the way I live it.