Actress

I started modeling at 28. I'm 5-feet-7 1/2, and I never went on a diet. I followed what my doctor told me: 'It's good to have a little bit of fat. Your weight is fine. Don't go any lighter.'

Ever since I was a little girl, I have always loved animals and been fascinated with them.

When I was a teenager, I thought maybe I'll be a filmmaker, making film documentaries. My dream when I was a girl was I would be hired by 'National Geographic' or work with David Attenborough, but it didn't happen. I became a model.

A lot of the advertisement is done by saying: first of all, have a complex about who you are.

As I grew older, I worked less as an actor and as a model, and I went back to what I had tried to do when I was young but wasn't really available. I'm so glad now to be in my sixties and to be able to go back to school.

If we are completely honest with ourselves, everyone has a dark side to their personalities.

It's a new business for me to be a filmmaker.

I'm always a little worried when people have met me in person because I'm worried they'll be disappointed.

Women who stay true to themselves are always more interesting and beautiful to me: women like Frida Kahlo, Georgia O'Keeffe and Anna Magnani - women who have style, chic, allure and elegance. They didn't submit to any standard of beauty - they defined it.

I don't look at 'Vogue' to ask what I'm going to wear. Because it's something on a body too young. I have to look at the social pages to see women my age. To see how Amanda Burden is dressed and say, 'Hmmm. Maybe I should try that.'

Many years in New York has made me urban, and I won't eat my chicken because I met him personally!

I always dreamed when I was a little girl interested in animals that I would go live in Africa. Then I found out that you can look in your backyard, and you can do your own safari.

That is the great pleasure of working with great directors. You get to look at the world through many different prisms. I guess I love talent, whatever form it takes.

I've always been an entertainer all my life; I come from a family of entertainers. I always made, very pretentiously, a comparison with Agatha Christie. Her inspiration was crime, and I'm sure she must have taken courses or read about crime, because it was the basis of her stories. But ultimately, it was her own fantasy.

You don't do an experimental film to become rich, so the people who are involved are involved because they enjoy the creative aspect of it.

I became an actress way into my 30s because I thought that I had to find my own way, and that's why I worked so much in modelling, until I realised that the differences between acting and modelling weren't that great. I always say that modelling is a little bit like being a silent actress.

These same people seem to forget that mother also took a lot of chances with the type of roles she played.

I like to extend myself as an actress and David really helped me.

I am much more radical in my beliefs than my products represent me to be.

I don't wear much makeup, except during work. I felt lucky to be chosen to be a model. I used to joke, 'The next best thing to winning the lottery is having a beauty contract.'