 Both my parents were doctors, and my mother had her surgery in the house. There were six children. |
| I was often very, incredibly naughty, and if I didn't come home at tea time I used to be sent to bed without any dinner. But people used to bring me things: I was better fed in bed. |
| I sort of was good at writing essays. I was never very good at mathematics, and I was never very good at algebra. I loved science, but I wasn't sure of it. |
| I was a hard worker, and I always knew my lines. |
| If you've got a lot of children, I think you let the other children bring them up more and you just sort of step in and do stuff like every now and again. |
| At boarding school you had to wear your name across your chest and your back, and obviously I had a pretty funny name. It wasn't Brown or Smith or Hughes. |
| You never came home for lunch: you just stayed doing, playing, having fun, surfing, running round. |
| My mother felt it was time that I had some parental control, so I went off to America and went to New York. |
| My father said, If you want to do acting, you have to be successful, which is a silly thing to say. |
| I had a place in England and was commuting from England to Australia, which is pretty stupid, but after two years I sort of knew what I wanted to do, more or less. |
| The best part of learning any profession, when you're really going through those huge stretching escalated times of learning and energy, is when you want to do it so much. |
| If you were in the film industry at that time, you were always picked up by directors who were much older. You were whisked about and shown things. I did work very hard though. |
| I didn't know what to do with myself. I wasn't excited by the teaching of the school. If they'd been intent on really teaching you things, I would have been a little more attentive. |
| Once, the parental bed collapsed because all the children sat on it at once. |
| I learnt the theory of movement, which I still teach sometimes. I was very, very ambitious to learn a skill. |
| Blank House was exactly a nice empty sheet where nothing was accountable because you were so naughty that you were in Blank House. |
| The most surprising thing for my mother and father was when I was actually earning more money than them by the time I was about 18. They thought I was going to be the ne'er do well, who they'd have to keep worrying about. |
| When I did Taming of the Shrew, I was very tired, and I decided to have a holiday and make a documentary. |
| I got through my teen years by being a bit of a clown. |
| Very quickly, without really looking back or trying, I was just suddenly lifted into another sphere. |
