I remember once when I told Lindsay Anderson at a party that acting was just a sophisticated way of playing cowboys and Indians he almost had a fit.

Pretending to be other people is my game and that to me is the essence of the whole business of acting.

It would be difficult to have any unfulfilled ambitions because I don't have any ambitions. I've never been that kind of performer.

I have done quite a lot of outsider figures.

You can't lose your concentration at all. And there are times when you're on the stage, and you've got silence, which is wonderful, but you have to have the confidence to make you realize it's fine. You can't suddenly wobble and think, 'They're not interested.'

My father's a clergyman, and he was in the mission field for a certain amount of time in British Honduras, which is now Belize.

I first decided that I wanted to act when I was 9. And I was at a very bizarre prep school at the time; to say 'high Anglo-Catholic' would be a real English understatement.

I can't say that I wouldn't prefer to make small films, basically because I think they are probably more interesting in terms of the material. But every now and again, it's quite good to do a big one.

Parents are the worst teachers, if they are good at it and you're not. My father thought I was the densest offspring he could have produced.

I'm horribly self-critical.

Everything that came to me, in terms of the ritzier side of performing, was a plus.

I'm not really a big musical fan. I enjoyed 'West Side Story' when it came out, but it gets a bit tired in the end.

I don't care about the length of anything I play, as long as it's a good character.

I knew I didn't want to pursue an academic career at all, which, of course, my father would have loved me to have done. I didn't want to go to university. The only other thing I could do was paint, and so I went to art school because they couldn't conceive of how one would be an actor.

If you do an interview in 1960, something it's bound to change by the year 2000. And if it doesn't, then there's something drastically wrong.

I mark a script like an exam, and I try not to do anything under 50 per cent. Similarly with the part. And also film is a peculiar thing, parts don't necessarily read in script form anything like as well as they can do when it comes to materialising.

My mother's father drank and her mother was an unhappy, neurotic woman, and I think she has lived all her life afraid of anyone who drinks for fear something like that might happen to her.

Half the stuff I have done which has been successful would never have been made if it had been shown to focus groups.

Don't forget there are two sides to performing. Finding the truth, but you also have to be transparent enough for the audience to see it. How many times have you seen a performance and thought: 'Well, it seems to be meaning a great deal to you but it ain't coming across to me?' It is to be shared.

I'm essentially the result of other people's imagination. And that's fine. Because of other people's imagination, I've played parts I would never have thought I could do. Still, I've never had a hankering or an ambition for any particular role.

I have lots of favourite memories but I can't say that I have a favourite film.

Film is not literature - the image on screen is the information you get.

I like the physical activity of gardening. It's kind of thrilling. I do a lot of weeding.

I turn up in Los Angeles every now and then, so I can get some big money films in order to finance my smaller money films.