I am always naturally drawn to heroines that have human flaws because I enjoy people that have lived their life with courage and make big successes and big failures.

I would argue that something dark is lurking between the sexes, and that it is seeping out into cinema.

I realise there's an innate paradox in promoting oneself on the one hand and saying, 'Oh, I don't want to be famous,' on the other.

When you talk to women who were working as print journalists or in broadcasting in the '50s, and then you talk to women who were working in the late '60s, there's an enormous difference. There had already been a huge transition. Then, of course, you get well into the '70s and there were women with children working.

Acting is a strange job because your control is very limited.

I read the paper pretty much every day, as well as getting news from the Internet and on TV. But I don't do social media at all; I'm a Luddite from that point of view.

I can only do something that my sister or my daughter, if I have one, could watch and feel positive about.

There was quite a lot of lying around in fields at Stonar, a small independent girls' school in the country near Bath. It was a non-selective school and the right environment for me: academically not particularly pushy.

I was brought up with a very strong sense of what can happen if your society starts to chip away at the small victories women have won for themselves.

The advent of digitally enhancing images - and the fact that actresses weren't protesting against that - created an environment where big corporations felt like they had total ownership over the bodies of actresses.

Postwar Europe was morally stagnant, and there was a lot of neo-conservatism.

I wish I was a more adventurous person in a way. But actually, security is a really big deal for me.

The point of being a movie star is that people cast you in a role. Actors tie themselves in knots trying to get out of that.

I wouldn't want to direct - I think that's a very different job. You have to be a very specific type of person to do that.

I'd always try to get a C, maybe a B. Other girls would trot off a brilliant essay and go off to Oxford; I'd think: 'Where is the justice?' I took A-levels in English, history and theatre studies and got three Bs.

There are people who you see on screen and think, 'Wow, that's a slim person,' and in the flesh they look nearly dead.

If you are an actress in L.A., on your 40th birthday they should just hand you the keys to the lunatic asylum.

I've always scribbled, and I still do it. I've written numerous scripts for films for which I think I'd be perfect as the complex, intelligent and, yes, modern heroine. Embarrassingly bad, all of them. I've had to come to terms with the fact that I'm not a writer.

There's no way I could ring up a company that was lending me a red-carpet dress and say, 'Do you have it in a 10?' Because all the press samples are an 8 - I would say a 'small 8.'

I cheated at the Model United Nations when I was 13 and had to get up and apologise in front of the whole conference.

It's a sad fact that a lot of those countries who haven't been involved in the war in Iraq have taken far more responsibility for rehoming people displaced by the war than Britain has done.

If you are a 19-year-old woman, there are very specific things that directors and the people in positions of power in the industry - who tend to be older men - are going to want you to be and do. They are not going to want some chatty, difficult, slightly spoilt girl.

I think one of the reasons I've done so much period work is because I feel so depressed by how society chooses to represent women in contemporary work.

Increasingly, it's actresses doing the big fashion advertising campaigns, and now there's no distinction between actresses and models.

I can't spend the rest of my life being pretty in a bonnet.

I love my home, spend as much time in London as I can, and try wherever possible to avoid travelling for work. Sometimes I think I'm really badly equipped to be an actress.

I'd actually really love to review books and films and plays, but you can't be an artist and a critic. I would love it if I could.

Normally, when you're working on something, there are other characters that you have alliances with, and you have unified goals with some characters.

I've done a few costume dramas, and people say, 'What was it like wearing the costumes? Did they really help you with your character?,' and most of the time it doesn't make any difference. You're wearing something a bit weird, and it's sort of uncomfortable, but it doesn't really have a huge impact on the part that you're playing.

I love science fiction. I read a lot of science fiction.

There's nothing very interesting about my life.