You grow up by making mistakes. I've made a ton of them, but as long as I keep on failing better, I don't mind.

I care so much less, now, about going up the ladder; if I cared about the ladder I would be doing it all very wrong.

And whatever my weight, I've always been skinny from the waist up.

I live quite an unsettled life.

I think work really is a life saver, because it carries you forward, which is good.

My mother, for the last 20 years anyway, would not call herself a Marxist but a human rights activist.

Seize the day. Well, I aspire to that anyway.

So often people say something and you realise you haven't really heard it.

There's still a bit of a problem, in that so many leading English roles are taken by American or French actresses.

To newspapers and publishing houses I urge the use of fact over fiction, freedom of the press, and responsibility at all times.

When I very first started out, I had that arrogance of youth.

Everyone knows in the industry that when these great roles come up, every two years, there's a huge number of people up for them. I'm not one of those top five females that can personally finance any film.

I'd love to adopt, but having a daughter, Daisy, who's in the middle of her teens, I'm now thinking: Is this a time to start all over again or is this a time to realise those child-rearing years are over?

It's very difficult when there are pictures taken on the red carpet. I find those things so terrifying that another persona just kicks in. I don't recognise myself.

OK, I wasn't as successful as, say, Julia Roberts, but I'd spent years in a very respectable career, some big American films but a host of other smaller, really exciting, maybe experimental films, being paid rubbish but working with fine people, that was what I thought I was known for.

So finally, I can feel a sort of pride in all my family - Mum, Lynn, Corin, Tasha, my cousin Gemma - because, I think how wonderful that this troop of gypsies can carry on telling stories.

The early part of my career I really struggled, getting turned down again and again. I was in debt, and it was horrible. And then my family hit such highs in their careers, I asked myself what I was thinking going into the same profession.

The highest pay cheque my mother ever received funded the building of a nursery school in Shepherd's Bush - the school cost well over three times the money she donated to the making of the film 'The Palestinian.' Unsurprisingly this always goes unmentioned in the press.