Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Of course I would like to be more famous. It offers more career possibilities. But then it can prove restrictive. Plus you get hassled when you go shopping.
One of the great things about doing a play, repeating it over and over again, is that you can practice. And you can get really quite good at it for a while.
It's curious that apart from the baroque ranting, 'Sarah & Duck' is very similar to 'The Thick Of It' - great characters, excellent writing and lots of humor!
You are in a strange world in pantomime, where you are allowed to step out and talk to the audience and do silly gags. Sometimes I feel like a cartoon character.
'La Cage' has got a broad appeal. It obviously appeals to the gay community, but it's also a good, fun show that appeals across a broad audience, a great big mixture.
Practice, learn the lines, work hard, don't be too respectful. Sometimes we can get too hung up on the fact that the material of the play is very finely wrought language.
I loved the variety of acting: turning your hand to different things and bringing whoever you were to it. There is something almost amateurish about it that appealed to me.
I live near a beautiful park, and when I walk around it, the beauty of it can take your breath away. It makes you realize there is something bigger, certainly bigger than me.
I like the fact that in the theatre nothing is ever finished because you're going to do it all over again tomorrow, whereas in telly once it's wrapped and in the can, that's it.
I came to theatre as a teenager by going to the National Theatre when it was at the Old Vic and sitting on padded seats in the gallery for 15 pence, which was the price of a bus fare.
I had done some acting at school, but I wasn't particularly good at it. What inspired me was going to the Old Vic in the late 1960s and early 1970s, when the National Theatre was based there.
When the National Theatre was built, it was a public building. If you wander round that building now, there are bits hived off for people who pay more money. That's happening across the arts.
People are just repeating mantras like, 'get Brexit done,' 'strong and stable,' 'dither and delay'. There must be a way of satirizing it, and I long to see it, but it's gone beyond 'The Thick of It.'
With those long American TV contracts you think, 'yes, at the end of that I'd be rich.' But at the same time you feel inside you a kind of death, because I enjoy playing lots of different characters.
That's the extraordinary thing about opera: it has the power to elicit a physical reaction. I don't know if I'd have been any good or not, but I do know that I was never committed enough to find out.
In the theatre, there were plenty of people having sex all over the place - wanting to, and doing it quite successfully - but male violence? Personally, I have witnessed very little. Very, very little.
Be ambitious. The great actor, director and playwright Ann Jellicoe commissioned writers like Howard Barker and David Edgar, and put on magnificent, large-scale plays in Dorset that involved the whole community.
When I watch my sons play, I think, God, acting's the most natural thing in the world. They take the 'Star Wars' characters and say, 'Let's pretend that I'm Hans and you're Luke and that we're on this planet,' etc.
I was nervous about a Corbyn government, although I would have supported it because a lot of the policies were good. I was far more nervous of a Conservative government but here it is, we've just got to deal with it.
I remember as a student going to Covent Garden, where they took out the stall seats and you hunkered down on the floor - I heard Pavarotti in Tosca there, and the experience of being in that same room with that astonishing voice has never left me.
My parents both came from working-class backgrounds, my father particularly. He came from a very poor family, 12 of them lived in a little three-bedroom terrace house in Fulham, it was very small with an outside loo and a tin bath on the scullery wall.
There's a particularly British way of going about things that I rather like, which is very different to the American way. It comes out of the amateur rep tradition of actors thinking: 'Well, I'm only 26, but I'll put on a beard and have a go at King Lear.'
I don't know who can constantly afford to go and see things. A play, which has five people in it and one set and it cost you 60 quid? And you're in a theatre that really hasn't had a great deal of money spent on it in the last 50 or 60 years? It's kind of weird.
I had a serious and rather drunken research session with the great Charles MacLean, who took me through the history of whisky and malts. I can't remember a thing about it now. In fact I don't think I remembered a thing about it the following morning. Very, very entertaining.
I listened to a clip someone had put up of me singing 'I Am What I Am' in the musical 'La Cage aux Folles.' I thought I was absolutely dreadful. It's like when you see photos of yourself at parties - at the time you thought you looked so cool and glamorous but you just look a bit drunk.
Bizarrely, someone involved in the children's show 'Sarah and Duck,' which I narrate, recently found a coat with my name on it in a secondhand shop. It's the coat I wore as Theseus in the 'Dream.' So it's back in my possession after all these years, which is rather strange and wonderful.
I invented this wonderful death scene for Javert of going down on my knees and then leaning back like a limbo dancer to make it look as if I was falling off a bridge. I did it eight times a week for nearly a year and I've had trouble with my knees ever since - they don't even allow me to jog these days.
But one of the satisfying things about performing a play is you know for that piece of time exactly what you're going to be doing. Your life has a physical pattern. There's something about the odd, repetitious nature of it that I find hugely relaxing. All the problems of life are taken care of for that bit of time.
I remember once about 10 years ago when I was injured, having to rehearse, and I was walking with a stick. And I was terribly touched by the amount of people willing to give up a seat. You often hear that London is so brusque and rude, but the grace with which people negotiate incredibly crowded spaces is something rather nice.