A lot of directors want to storyboard you, whereas the best way to get a performance out of an actor is a collaborative process where you listen to the actor's input.

I live for my work, apart from my family who come first. And I live to tell stories and pretend to be other people, it's something I've been doing since I was 3 years old. Maybe it's because I'm intrinsically bored with myself, and I find other people more interesting.

No, I'm so well-known at home I think they think of me like a piece of comfortable furniture that's always been around that they're not going to throw out.

'Promiscuous' implies that I'm not choosy. In fact I'm very choosy. I just happen to have had a lot of choices.

I love getting presents. And awards. I'd do whatever they told me to do.

I've had five weddings but if I'm really honest and if I count significant de factos... I've had nine husbands... which sounds appalling but when you consider I started at 18 and I'm 65 it's not so bad.

I've had my share of villains and played some fairly nasty characters. But I've been acting for so long. I started out as the girl next door. Now I'm the grandmother next door.

I was sent the script for 'Silver Linings' when I was doing a play in D.C. at The Kennedy Center with Cate Blanchett and I was sent the script and asked if I was interested, and I said 'Oh, boy am I!'

Well, I've been acting for 50 years now, professionally. I've been acting a lot longer. My mother reckons I was acting when I got out of the womb. But because I've been working in the theater, I've probably only done about 25 movies but I've done more than 100 plays.

It's one of the functions of the theater to shock and titillate and appall, apart from entertain and delight.

I'm a nice middle-class girl in real life, and I'm a mom and a grandma, and I usually play sweet characters.

A lot of actors, whatever movie you're working on, you make up a back story just for your own, to work off, even if the audience doesn't have it revealed to them. I think it's important that the audience makes up their own mind.

I'm in fact Australian but my mother's English so I've got no problem playing a domineering English woman.

I've done a lot of plays before where I had to do a New York accent, but never a Philly one before. They do the rhotic 'r' - where you say the 'r' - where most New Yorkers don't.

Sexism is alive and well! We were saying this forty years ago. I'm an optimist, so I like to think we've progressed in some ways - in Australia, we get equal pay.

I remember I was a little girl when Elizabeth Taylor stole Eddie Fisher from America's Sweetheart, Debbie Reynolds, and the reaction back then was enormous! And Angelina Jolie was in trouble, too, for taking a husband away from another America's Sweetheart. Don't take husbands from America's Sweethearts.

I guess just a lively imagination is the best effort an actor can have.

You learn stuff from every character you play about the human condition that can be quite enlightening.

We're becoming so much better at destigmatizing all sorts of things, including mental illness in 'Silver Linings.'

I love gay Mardi Gras in Sydney, which is a big parade, a big march that thousands and thousands of people participate in. And there's one little group... well it's not little, it's got hundreds of people marching, and they're all very sweet, middle-aged and elderly people who are the parents of gay children who are out and proud.

I know that Philadelphians hate New York actors passing off New York accents as Philadelphian when they are quite different.

Most Australians who've got an ear can do an American accent because we grow up listening to them on television and in movies.

I'm under five feet; I'm very small, 4'11 1/2.

I've always said about awards that they're meaningless until you win one, and then they're best thing in the world. The other thing about awards is that they engender respect from areas where it might never have come from without it.

The thing about being an actor is that every new job is a new challenge. Sometimes you'll have a shot, and it doesn't work. Sometimes it'll work better than you expected.

I was an adventurer, and I got married a few times. I kept trying to find a relationship as good as my parents'.

I live for my work, apart from my family who come first. And I live to tell stories and pretend to be other people, it's something I've been doing since I was 3 years old. Maybe it's because I'm intrinsically bored with myself, and I find other people more interesting. The more different they are, the bigger the challenge.

I don't play many characters like myself. Oh I don't know what I am!

I do have friends in Australia who now refer to me as 'Hollywood Jack.'

It's a basic tenet you learn at drama school. If you're playing someone evil, you can't make an objective moral judgment. You've got to get inside the character and empathize as much as possible.

When you get as old as I am, you kind of believe there's nothing new under the sun, but there's always a fresh way of looking at something. That's why I love working with young people. They remind you of things you used to know and have since forgotten.