I was, as the prophet said, hungering and thirsting for righteousness. I found it at the eternal and material core of Christianity: body, blood, bread, wine, poured out freely, shared by all.

I love the international feeling In New Yokk. Different foods. Different people. There's everything here. Museums, theatre, there's so much to do I feel guilty about not doing too many things.

I'm a romantic and will only marry for love where there's respect and compatibility. I'd like to be with someone if the right person came along. I really like male company. I like the male mind.

My taste is very eclectic. I love musicals, but I also love the classics. I've seen some fantastic productions. I was in a musical for 600 performances in Australia that I first saw in New York.

It's a basic tenet you learn at drama school. If you're playing someone evil, you can't make an objective moral judgment. You've got to get inside the character and empathize as much as possible.

If there was a distraction I'd get up and jump out the window. I was quite out of hand. In schools like that I don't think they expect that girls are going to behave in such an outrageous fashion.

Be yourself - it's the inner beauty that counts. You are your own best friend, the key to your own happiness, and as soon as you understand that - and it takes a few heartbreaks - you can be happy.

I'm a lyric soprano. I can try to step outside that and do different kind of singing, but it's not something I can sustain over the long haul, and what is good for your voice is good for your career.

I was sent the script for 'Silver Linings' when I was doing a play in D.C. at The Kennedy Center with Cate Blanchett and I was sent the script and asked if I was interested, and I said 'Oh, boy am I!'

I feel like I'm one of the many working mothers. And I only have one child. I know working mums who have three or four. It's definitely a challenge but it's a wonderful challenge to be able to do both.

I've had five weddings but if I'm really honest and if I count significant de factos... I've had nine husbands... which sounds appalling but when you consider I started at 18 and I'm 65 it's not so bad.

Nowadays, people send rockets into space, and I think it does make you question if there's a God. They can make babies in a dish now! Everything we're seeing goes against what people always believed in.

When I won the Tony, I blacked out. I don't remember anything. I had bullet points jotted down, but I forgot to read half of them. My hands were shaking. It was an insane honor to be recognized in that way.

When I was seven, I wanted to be Esther Williams. I was drummed out of Brownies because I snuck off to the cinema to watch an Esther Williams festival - my greatest wish if I get to Hollywood is to meet her.

My real fantasy if I was to drop out would be to live in a mobile home and be a hippie and drive around festivals and have millions of children - children with dreadlocks and nose rings - and play the flute.

The most interesting characters are those you're drawn to, then repelled by, and then come to understand. All that tension - I live that. But I don't plan the tension. It's just something that should happen.

When I was 13, I moved from New Jersey to Germany with my family. The high school was so supportive of my dream to continue with my theater training; instead of taking PE, I would get credit for dance lessons.

I've been a single parent for a long time. It reminds me of being a waitress. As you walk back to the kitchen, requests come at you from all sides. You're doing the job of two - you have to be highly organised.

I'd see my daddy about once a month, and I missed him. I would have loved to have had more of him. He was tall, attractive and very quiet, very gentle. He had a wife who I don't think ever really liked me much.

The thing about being an actor is that as we get older, there are more and more characters to explore and, in general, they get more complicated, so you get to bring all your crazy life experience to the table.

It's funny in the U.K., where I'm not really known because I never did a soap. My English cousins in the Lake District think I'm not a real actor because they've never seen me in 'Home and Away' or 'Neighbours.'

Now that I'm on Broadway, it's like NASA engineering with the costumes. I was very grateful for the slightly more high-tech ones in my show, 'Venus in Fur'; our costume designer Anita Yavich is kind of a genius.

If I went out in killer heels and full makeup, blow dry, the whole thing — anyone dressed up like that could be intimidating to men and women, really. It's so, look at me. Do you know what I mean? But I love women.

When you're doing comedy, you're not trying to be funny. I think things are funny when the character is taking it totally seriously. I think when people are winking, it becomes slapstick, it becomes something else.

If I went out in killer heels and full makeup, blow dry, the whole thing - anyone dressed up like that could be intimidating to men and women, really. It's so, look at me. Do you know what I mean? But I love women.

I spoke French a bit, and I could speak a bit of this and that, and when you were taught those things by people who couldn't really do it, you can do some pretty wonderfully, imaginative horrific things to teachers.

I always wanted to make an album, but I knew that I didn't want it to be a musical theater album. It's not that I don't love them - I own every musical theater album ever made - but it just didn't seem right for me.

I always thought Broadway's the goal, and then I moved out to L.A. with 'Wicked' and started doing guest-star spots and little recurring things, and I was like, 'Well, this is pretty great; I'm kind of digging this.'

This is why Alzheimer's is such a terrible disease: the body of the person you love is there, but they've gone - your husband is gone - and they become your child, and you have to look after them as you would a child.

Im mad keen on recycling because Im worried about the next generation and where all this waste were producing is going. It has to stop. I wash out my plastic containers and recycle envelopes, everything I possibly can.

I think the way that I delivered my request for acting was undeniable, and I think that I was blessed enough to have parents who saw it as something that there was no argument about. For that, I will always be grateful.

I don't really know what 'American' is. I know what Ukrainian is. We're happy Slavic people. We're not Dostoyevsky Slavic people. There's this sense of 'pick it up, get your hands dirty, make the best of it, celebrate.'

I like acting too much and it's too, I'm just too busy doing that and I'm too hungry for it, to get behind the camera. I mean, unless I could act in it, too. I don't think I've got the right brain. I'm too disorganized.

There's something about 'Strictly Come Dancing.' Everywhere I go, people wish me good luck; cabbies toot their horns. It's lovely. I have a theory: in straitened times, there's nothing like a bit of unapologetic escapism.

I'm mad keen on recycling because I'm worried about the next generation and where all this waste we're producing is going. It has to stop. I wash out my plastic containers and recycle envelopes, everything I possibly can.

The most surprising thing for my mother and father was when I was actually earning more money than them by the time I was about 18. They thought I was going to be the ne'er do well, who they'd have to keep worrying about.

It is a political thriller. It's very action packed and it's very exciting, but at the same time it's a very big soulful love story about longing and loss. They're not separate, they're completely dependent on one another.

Every director's so different. Everybody has their own modus operandi and I love getting to know different directors in the way they work. David O. Russell is very exciting to be with because he's got a mind like quicksilver.

As soon as I leave the world [of the show], I want to turn around and come back. That's how real it is. As soon as I leave the theater I want to wake up and come back the next day and do it all over again. It's that much fun.

Well, I'm not at all like the tough, sexy femme fatale in Confidence but it's fun to play people who're really different from you, from different cultures and places. I suppose I'm a bit quieter than most of the people I play.

The advantage of age is that you swap youth for wisdom. You're so full of insecurities when you're young. 'Who am I? What do I have to do for people to like me?' You get caught up in things. You get very emotional about things.

I think it's nice to age gracefully. OK, you lose the youth, a certain stamina and dewy glow, but what you gain on the inside as a human being is wonderful: the wisdom, the acceptance and the peace of mind. It's a fair exchange.

I just want to say to women, 'Be yourself - it's the inner beauty that counts. You are your own best friend, the key to your own happiness, and as soon as you understand that - and it takes a few heartbreaks - you can be happy.'

A lot of actors, whatever movie you're working on, you make up a back story just for your own, to work off, even if the audience doesn't have it revealed to them. I think it's important that the audience makes up their own mind.

I have absolutely no empathy for camels. I didn't care for being abused in the Middle East by those horrible, horrible, horrible creatures. They don't like people. It's not at all like the relationship between horses and humans.

It's also that comedians don't have the kind of narcissism that actors have. They're writers who perform their own material. It's more interesting. And they're sexy because they risk more. Stand-up comedians risk more than anyone.

I've always said about awards that they're meaningless until you win one, and then they're best thing in the world. The other thing about awards is that they engender respect from areas where it might never have come from without it.

You know, you can't see or touch and isn't embodied. But they were all fallible, the Gods. And they would kind of rise and fall. You know, they all, like Achilles, Icarus, you know, they all had their high points and their low points.

At the beginning of my acting career, I worked for two seasons at the RSC and spent a lot of time in the Cotswolds exploring Shakespeare's countryside. It's my kind of English landscape, with its tiny villages and one-room thatched pubs.

I loved math and science. It just made sense to me. But my hatred for world history has come to bite me in the butt in my adult years. Every show I have done professionally has required me to study the world in which my characters lived.

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