Joanna Lumley

Actress

216 Quotes

I was involved with the landmines before the Princess of Wales, and nobody gave a damn about people losing their limbs. It only became a success when she came along.

I do not like bad photographs. I don't like to be badly lit. There is a fashion, particularly on stage, for very 'toppy' lighting, which makes a child look 50. Ten o'clock is very good. If someone is taking a picture, you say, 'Lamps at 10 o'clock,' then everybody looks lovely.

Women are very different to men, and that hasn't been respected. So when people say there's never been a good woman painter or poet or engineer or whatever, they don't understand that our skills are many simultaneously and men's skills are single.

In Kenya you've got the great birds and monkeys leaping through the trees overhead. It's a chance to remember what the world is really like.

I love a cardboard coffin. Both Mummy and Daddy went off in cardboard coffins, painted - Daddy's was rifle green. Beautifully made.

There's an appetite for vigour in films. The camera loves a bit of movement. Movement is usually attached to younger people and men, and that's just the way it is. I think that it's a bitter pill to swallow, but it's a fact that there aren't going to be masses and masses of roles for older women because there isn't the audience for it.

It's so important to keep a marriage alive with small treats and doing little things for each other. Just remembering to say nice things and to have listening time is vital. That ghastly phrase 'quality time' means taking three minutes to sit down and be still with someone rather than yelling over your shoulder as you rush out.

There is something so quiet and so industrious, something so Viking about the Scots.

I've been dealing with the press for 45 years. You need a very long spoon to sup with them. While you are always grateful, they are like badly trained dogs. They smile and wag and bite your arm off.

The press have given me affairs I've never had and killed a few I did have. After a while, you learn.

The concept of Shwopping is so clever, I think. The idea is that every time someone goes shopping, they can take an unwanted item of clothing and pop it in the recycling bin in their M&S store for Oxfam.

I love being a grandmother. That feeling you have for your own child - you don't ever think it will be replicated, and I did wonder if I would have to 'pretend' with my grandchildren. But my heart was taken on day one.

I've got lots of good friends. I could have affairs. I can read a book all night, put the cat on the end of the bed. I can pick up my passport and go to France. I don't have to ask anybody.

I never mind scrubbing floors, vacuuming or bending and carrying stuff. Each time I do it I think, this is instead of going to the gym.

I don't think men are that attracted by glamour. I think women are attracted by glamour. I think men are attracted by a sense of friendship.

There was one 'crime' during the whole time I was at school, when a fountain pen went missing. Stealing just didn't happen. I was taught not to shoplift, not to steal, not to behave badly. We weren't even allowed to drop litter.

I quite often don't have breakfast, and I never have lunch. I find it helps not to wake my stomach up because if I had a good big breakfast, I would be ready for a snack at 11 and then a three-course lunch, then I'd be ready for tea, then a cocktail and then an enormous dinner.

I'm very good at getting up in the morning - so much of my life has been spent on film sets where we start at the crack of dawn.

I'm a vegetarian, and I long for people to eat less meat, but the thing to do is not to go, 'Eat! Less! Meat!' It's to say, 'I am fit as a flea and I'm 63, I haven't eaten meat for 40 years, and I never get diseases, I'm never ill, and I'm full of energy. So how's about that?'

We met and married when both of us knew exactly what our jobs were. He was only 32, but he'd been all over the place. I'd been working on films and television shows all over the world.

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