My alter egos have changed a lot over the years. When I was a child, I was a black horse called Storm. Whinnying and jumping over bamboo poles in the garden took up pretty much my entire childhood.
I have always been interested in gender politics, so I'm not that keen on doing things that don't represent a truth about women.
I'm fundamentally a busy person; I spend my time doing useful things and profoundly useless things!
Our conception of 1950s underwear is a lovely vintage aesthetic, but actually, wearing stockings with no elastic and a girdle was heavy duty.
The advent of digitally enhancing images - and the fact that actresses weren't protesting against that - created an environment where big corporations felt like they had total ownership over the bodies of actresses.
The language of freedom-fighting was so co-opted by the baby boomers in order to express their now-hopelessly compromised ideologies that no other generation could emulate it without a smirk. This has created an apathetic generation in the West, with young people no longer distinguishing between the old order and the new.
The point of being a movie star is that people cast you in a role. Actors tie themselves in knots trying to get out of that.
I am always naturally drawn to heroines that have human flaws because I enjoy people that have lived their life with courage and make big successes and big failures.
There's no way I could ring up a company that was lending me a red-carpet dress and say, 'Do you have it in a 10?' Because all the press samples are an 8 - I would say a 'small 8.'
When you talk to women who were working as print journalists or in broadcasting in the '50s, and then you talk to women who were working in the late '60s, there's an enormous difference. There had already been a huge transition. Then, of course, you get well into the '70s and there were women with children working.
It's a sad fact that a lot of those countries who haven't been involved in the war in Iraq have taken far more responsibility for rehoming people displaced by the war than Britain has done.
A passion for any novel, and any character, can crystallise your ideas when you really need to be as open as possible as a performer.
I just don't believe you're capable of being an actor unless you have a desire to experience your emotions in a public way.
There was quite a lot of lying around in fields at Stonar, a small independent girls' school in the country near Bath. It was a non-selective school and the right environment for me: academically not particularly pushy.
If you are an actress in L.A., on your 40th birthday they should just hand you the keys to the lunatic asylum.
I think the problem is that there has been a kind of backlash against feminism. I think women just didn't really see themselves winning that fight, and I think that probably led to a lot women feeling trapped in a perpetual cycle of disappointment - trying to be feminists and failing to be.
I realise there's an innate paradox in promoting oneself on the one hand and saying, 'Oh, I don't want to be famous,' on the other.
I would argue that something dark is lurking between the sexes, and that it is seeping out into cinema.
Nowadays, most women just assume they have a right to be in the workplace, and any kind of discrimination they suffer is sort of more creeping.
My main ambitions, really, are in the theatre.
