My body has done for me all these years things I couldn't ever even dreamt to do for characters. It's a tool, molecularly speaking, and I need to take care of it.

Through all of this lovely interviewing, and nice things people say, and the rest of it, I have learned that I am an actor. That is my profession. That is my job. That is how I make a living. So I am just out there making a living.

To play someone when the character masks their own emotions, doesn't understand their own emotions, has no release for their own emotions, and yet is full of emotion - that is a much harder character to play than someone who has somewhere to put it.

Well, I don't think of myself as a feminist at all. As soon as we start labeling and categorizing ourselves and others, that's going to shut down the world.

You know, when I got started on television in the '80s, you would go to the costume department, and if you were a female they put you into a skirt. And you had a pocketbook, usually a shoulder bag.

An actor has to be very, very careful, as one of the most wonderful props - and actors love props - is a cigarette. There's so much to do with it: you can bring it up to your face, play with the smoke. It's just the greatest - ever since I was 16 and in acting school in England, I've been playing around with cigarettes.

Acting is the business of truth, so that we can see ourselves reflected back and learn.

I am a smoker, I'm ashamed to say. I had given it up for many years, then picked it up again. It's a horrible habit. I struggle with myself all the time. And I love to smoke.

An actor's life is fairly lonely.

Being an actor on a movie set is like going to the playground at recess.

I think this notion of acting and glamour is getting in everybody's way.

I'm a very lucky girl who gets to act for a living! So why sit around griping and grousing about what's not there.

I'm not particularly fond of the hybrid writer-director or actor-director.

I'm very old-school. I like a director to direct me. I like to be the actor.

My mom was a '70s mom. She paved a road that no one had yet walked.

People often expect me to be something other than what I am.

Supporting actors are the support. You can't make a building without support. You can't buy dinner without support.

That's probably the biggest secret of acting: If the actor believes it themselves, they can make you believe it.

The climate informs the character.

The key to acting has much more to do with listening than with talking.