I'd studied English literature at university, but I was also far more enamored with Virginia Woolf, Katherine Mansfield, and James Joyce. That was my passion.
I would like to sit down with Emily Dickinson, Virginia Woolf, PJ Harvey, and Bjork. That would be a good dinner in my mind. Strong women. I think I would enjoy that.
It may be that Tolstoy and Virginia Woolf were sitting around fretting about their Amazon reviews or their pre-pub whatever, but I kind of doubt it. I don't think that's how the work probably got made.
Vita Sackville-West is one of my favorite female icons. She was a writer and a prolific gardener, but she also had a relationship with Virginia Woolf, and she was married to Sir Harold Nicolson. She was a woman who lived outside of norms.
I used to do karaoke with Patrick Woolf in a karaoke box, and he would ring me up and say, 'Come down and do karaoke with me here,' and then we'd sing Kate Bush songs and get really, really emotional and theatrical in the booth.
I don't attack any kind of script or shooting with some philosophy that is discernible even to myself. It might just be art and love: When I got my Academy Award for 'Virginia Woolf' in the middle of the Vietnam War, I said, 'I hope we can use our art for peace and love.'
No one in a novel by Virginia Woolf ever filled up the petrol tank of her car. No one in Hemingway's postwar novels ever worried about the effects of prolonged exposure to the threat of nuclear war.
I fell in love with Virginia Woolf in college. I especially admire how well she writes about daily life, how she captures so much meaning and consequence in the smallest details of a day.
As an actor, to go and see those shows - great plays like 'Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?' and Clifford Odets's 'Golden Boy' - it's so exhilarating. I'd personally love to perform the role of Jerry in Edward Albee's 'The Zoo Story.' He's a transient, lost soul, and an example of humanity at its rawest.
When I saw Virginia Woolf, somewhere between the first and second acts, someone I had known as my mother became somebody else.
