“I sometimes do worry that actors are people’s role models, you know. And doctors and teachers and people doing really important things just get paid nothing. And they put us on the cover of magazines. They should be our heroes. I find it all a bit dubious.”

“I’m a bit superstitious about certain things, like what shoes to wear. If I wear the wrong shoes, the whole day may go wrong. Or if I don’t get to the bottom of the stairs before the door closes – stupid little things like that. Then I also have all the normal ones, like don’t walking under ladders and so on.”

“I’m not one for parties and stuff like that. I get a bit nervous around lots of people. Being invisible is what I really enjoy. That I find quite entertaining.”

“I found myself a sophisticated, educated American. He’s not an actor. He’s traveled the world. He knows where Europe is, unlike a lot of Americans. He’s very cultured, but he’s all man.”

“What I love about men is that is if they see a fly buzzing, they have to kill it. Immediately. It’s the weirdest thing. They become like a lion. And animal of prey. They’re jumping on chairs, climbing up walls, until they kill the fly they can’t rest. I love that about men. It’s like you’re another species. I love it.”

“You just have to play every scene honestly and forget about a reaction and what the audience is going to think. I think the more seriously you take something, the more funny it might be.”

“People find out I’m an actress and I see that ‘whore’ look flicker across their eyes.”

“I have absolutely no empathy for camels. I didn’t care for being abused in the Middle East by those horrible, horrible, horrible creatures. They don’t like people. It’s not at all like the relationship between horses and humans.”

“The thirties have calmed me down. I know who my real friends are, I know what I want to do. In your twenties, you just do everything. It’s just overload all the time. In the thirties, you learn that it’s OK to go to bed early if you want.”

“There’s a lot of contemporary actresses I admire, but there’s practically no one who’s made a color movie whose career I’d want ... I don’t feel very modern at all.”

[On her parents] They’re very harsh critics and they’ve often said to me: “That was shit, you were crap,” but this is the first time [after seeing her as Amy Foster in Swept From the Sea] my father said to me: “I think one day you'll be a good actress.”

[On watching herself on screen] “It’s the worst feeling in the world. I’m very hard on myself and usually feel sick.”

“Being a mother has been incredible. But it can also be brutal. People think that you’re totally in bliss and that babies are always angelic creatures, but it’s not like that all the time.”

“Vincent [Perez] is stunning. My sister Minnie came down and had lunch with us and she just sat there staring at him with her mouth open.”

“I don’t like frogs. In Primrose Hill I got a toad in my bathroom. It was huge and it was ugly and it was in my bath. I was about to step in to have a shower. I was naked and there was a great, big, huge slimy toad. It was disgusting. I screamed and phoned a bloke I know and he came round and got it out. I just don’t like the texture, the noise. They’re grotesque.”

“I was thrown out of ballet when I was three because I couldn’t skip. I was a tree climber, so I was always muddy and had twigs in my hair.”

“Los Angeles makes you feel ugly. I’m not going to pretend I haven’t secretly wanted to be super-skinny, because all girls do. But I have a woman’s body, not a boy’s body. Most women do and should feel proud of their butts and their breasts and their bellies.”

[On the slums she was filming at in Africa] “The children had nothing – maybe a bit of string with a button on the end of it they’d pull along. But I didn’t see one child crying.”

“Women find talent very sexy.”