Actor

Success means your thoughts are worthy of everyone's consideration.

I come from a class which used to be called the gentry - which is nowadays mistakenly used to include the nobility, but in fact is not. The gentry was essentially the untitled landowning class.

To be honest, when you're running a series and you have an open end, you don't want to limit yourself too much with the choices you've got for a particular character.

What I dislike about movie culture is that it often presents a parable of our problems - but the issues are all straightforward and the people are either nice or they're not. In real life, everyone falls between those perimeters, but not many American films operate in that grey area.

You do get fond of your characters. Handing them on is like giving a child to a nanny.

I think American television changed world television in its reinvention of the series.

I think every period - except for the 14th century, or something - has some merits.

I always like to arrive at the airport early to enjoy breakfast and lounge about so that when I get on the plane all my travel fever has disappeared.

The business of life is learning that you can't lay down the terms.

My mother converted to Catholicism to marry my father.

What the Americans want to see is life in their drama. Life of all sorts: hard lives, easy lives, or lives which, like most of ours, are a mixture of the two.

We live a life that is often spent in crowds - parties, festivals and first nights - so it's nice to avoid them.

Most of us don't want to be outsiders.

We don't really like rules. We think, in some way, they are an infringement of liberty.

My childhood was a happy one, spent in a tall house in South Kensington and later in East Sussex, but my early and mid teens were less successful.

Well, you've got to be known for something. The danger of extreme versatility is that you don't spring to mind for anything.

Of course I love winning things; I can't tell you how much I enjoy it.

People tend to view history as if it were another planet and think the modern world was invented in 1963. I don't agree.

I have fits of melancholia when I watch the news, but we all do, don't we?

You see, in America, it's quite standard for an actor to sign, at the beginning of a series, for five or seven years. The maximum any British agent will allow you to have over an actor is three years.