'Ambitious' is seen as a dirty word, especially when it comes to women. But what being ambitious actually means is to achieve distinction in your chosen field.
Rachael Stirling
I remember typing up my dissertation sitting in a horse box - I didn't qualify for a caravan - on a set in Pinewood on my first film, 'Still Crazy.'
I feel sexier in my 40s than I did in my 20s and 30s.
I always hate it when I hear actors talking about the process of what they do, so I'll keep my thoughts to myself.
If you get asked to play a part that makes you feel frightened, then you have to do it. 'Medea' is the opportunity of a lifetime.
I eat healthily, I do ballet and exercise, and I'm toned and tight, but I take up space, and I don't aspire to anorexia.
I think if I'd been born ten years earlier when Ma was at the height of 'Avengers' fame, it would have been a different kettle of fish altogether, but she was very much a ma first and an actress second for my formative years.
You're in this heightened emotional state from the beginning of the play. It's like when you first have your heart broken.
I suppose I'm what you'd called a character actress, so, often, my characters are quite extreme.
I woke up famous for about a minute, then stopped being famous again.
I had been kind of quite porky and happy at boarding school and not self-conscious at all; then, suddenly, I found myself in auditions being examined, and it made me angry.
I fell upon Jenny Saville's work and loved these great big pieces she was painting, celebrating all things flesh and woman, and with great big Simone Beauvoir quotations written in mirror writing so you had to look at yourself in the pictures to read them.
I always like a character who makes me laugh.
If I'd been an actor in the 1940s, I would have been in fashion.
I won't change the way I talk for anyone. I'll do it for work but not because I think someone will like me more if I take the edge off.
The tabloids had a field day with 'Tipping The Velvet,' which was great for the viewing figures but not necessarily for the actors involved.
I teach kids to read on a Saturday for this charity called Real Action. It's a voluntary school because lots of the kids around my area of London are from immigrant families and need extra help with reading.
I find the idea that some kids go into acting because of their parents butt-clenchingly embarrassing. I've gone out of my way to prove myself as a separate being. I don't want to be seen as a subset of someone else.
Kristin Scott Thomas is terrific. She has a career in France and a career in England: how cool is that? I wouldn't mind that.
I love radio interviews; it's all about multitasking and, like all good women, I can do that.
I can't think of anything better than being considered a poster girl for intelligent women.
My mum is still totally rocking it. She's appearing in 'Game of Thrones,' which is massively cool.
She was just Ma, and I didn't grow up in some kind of acting dynasty: Orson Welles didn't come round and give me a piggyback; Vivien Leigh never read me a bedtime story. It was just my mum and our housekeeper, whom I adored, and after that, it was boarding school.
I want the kind of feminism that allows me to have a voice and to compete on equal terms with men yet still, potentially, to have one of them hurl me over their shoulder and carry me off somewhere, because I still find proper, old-fashioned masculinity deeply attractive.
If you aren't hot in Hollywood, you feel like you're in Siberia.
When you're on the verge of depression, a good leveller is to put one foot in front of the other and do some manual labour.
I know I'm not a hotly in-demand movie star, but I'm good at my job. And I want to keep working for the next 40 years.
I want to be around when I'm 60; I don't want to be some flash in the pan.
I do have strong feelings about the aristocracy: they serve a purpose, but it's a sort of insular strand of society.
Having brothers - I love that. They don't take any rubbish, and they beat you up if you've been misbehaving.
Just laughing a lot would be the most important thing in a relationship to me. And a smattering of trust. A dollop of laughter - and an icing of trust.
I did ballet as a child and started again seven years ago. I love that you hear this exquisite music, and for a moment, you feel like a thing of beauty; it's changed my awareness of my body.
I was brought up playing games and still do ferociously. I once played Connect Four on set with Bill Nighy and Richard E. Grant for so long that the assistant director got cross.
Not to harp on too much about Ma, but it's a misconception that she is formidable. She calls herself a patsy.
I do panic when I'm out of work, and there have been long periods of that. And I'm not a good auditionee. I talk myself out of jobs in front of the director and suggest other people who would be better.
I really resent how expensive everything is in London.
My instinct is to surround myself with the company of wise, witty, wonderful women, and I have a great bank of female friends of all ages.
I was raised to please people in authority, and I'd also come from a sheltered boarding school, so I was very naive and young for my years.
I didn't grow up or learn how to fully serve myself until I got my head down in the theatre.
My pa is a brilliant, charming man. We go out and play together and laugh a lot. He has a twinkle in his eye.
My dear dad always tried to introduce me to children of his friends, but I just never took to them. Those were the people we were shoved with at school dances, usually Eton boys because it was the cleverest boys' school, and ours was supposed to be the cleverest girls' school.
My mum says I never had tantrums. I had elongated and very complicated tea parties in my cot, and I was sort of talking, I guess, quite young, and I would say, 'Oh, how lovely to see you, do come in!' I'd have these theatrical tea parties by myself with my imaginary friends.
I love growing older. Normally, I don't bother with make-up. This face in the mirror is changing. I've got new lines from smiling at the sprog so much.
I used to worry about the lack of roles for women over 40. But suddenly, everyone has realised it's interesting to have a drama with a woman at the centre of it.
I panicked in my 20s and 30s about whether I was doing the right thing. I was an excited puppy, wanting to please people and feeling guilty that I'd had a privileged education and an acting career.
I have never met anybody who likes 'The Detectorists' that I don't like.
I suppose I'm quite manly in lots of ways, but I like to be made to feel like a woman.
When going out on a date, I think there are certain old-fashioned manners that I still enjoy. I don't mean that as an anti-feminist comment. I just mean it as a pro-women comment. There must be a place for us to exist and our differences to exist without one taking away from the other.
In my bones, I feel like a Scot. I always have. My mum's from Doncaster, so whatever that is as a combination of Scotland and Yorkshire. It isn't southern.
I was always drawn to standing up in front of people.
