Actor

My earliest memory is of my first day at primary school and the distress of seeing my mother part from me.And being in a room full of strangers - of aliens. I felt that I would never see her again.

I've played a lot of bad guys in my time, especially in movies. It's delightful playing the villain. It's almost the most interesting and most complicated role in a film.

I'm very resistant to most forms of theater.

When I ascended from the depths of the working class to the middle class, the higher I got, the more dishonesty I found.

After watching my poor mother being sometimes neglected by my father, it was almost tattooed on my brain that I would never cause hardship or despair to a partner.

I like a lot of international people. Julie Taymore, the American director - she's one of the most exciting directors I've seen.

I find it very satisfying to write because you can purge many things and vent what you feel under the mask of fiction.

Technology is the devil, and the more technology you have, the higher the price you pay.

The most vital part of your humanity is the love you have for others. To deny it is to deny your life.

It's impossible to have a favourite Shakespeare, since so many of the plays rouse and inspire completely different parts of your being.

We often find far more power in a symbol than in something that is an an actuality.

Art is a way of penetrating and going deep into our unconscious and creating amazing worlds - as the Greeks did, if you like, as did Ovid with his stories and his fantasies.

When I wrote 'East,' I wanted a completely earthy, very sexy, very violent play, so I wrote in verse. I found it not only satisfying but releasing. It gave me an opportunity to play with language. We never played the characters like the yobs that they are, but rather in a slightly heightened way.

The theatre is your pulpit - it is your church - and you want to be a priest in your church, and that's what I believe in.

With the feminist movement - a good movement which I support - there's been more overt criticism of the male, an attitude that men are failing to understand the finer nature of women, failing to appreciate their needs, failing to support them, failing to be compassionate.

As a child, you only think of the now.

The mainstream is generally garbage. Look at the heavily subsidized theaters.

My first name used to be Leslie. I snipped that off and put my middle name, which was Steven, in the front.

Anti-Semitism has never gone away; it will always be there because it's a very convenient prejudice. The gene of it, the original DNA, is buried deep within our history. And even within some Jews as well.

I have a daughter from a relationship I had in my late teens or early 20s. Because I felt it wasn't the kind of pukka behaviour my family or relatives would admit to, I denied it for many years.