Americans are very good at animating voices. I don't know why. They have a freedom with them that we British actors find more difficult to get to.
I hate people eating on film. I hate it even worse on the radio, when people eat on the radio. I just can't stand it.
I think of myself as Mirren rather than Mironova, absolutely. I am a Brit, really. I mean when I go to Russia and I do have, maybe it's a romantic fantasy. You know us actors, we're very good at romantic fantasies.
It's great to be queen!
It'll be the Internet and piracy that will kill film. There's a philosophy that the Internet should be free, but the reality is that piracy will destroy the film industry and film as an art form because it's expensive to make a movie. Maybe you'll have funky little independent movies, and it'll go back and then start up again some other way.
Words can be used for venal purposes. Words are incredible sources of propaganda and can cause terrible havoc.
When I'm choosing projects to be a part of it's always a combination of so many different things. The primary thing is the director. But a very important element is, is it different enough from anything else I've ever done, or what I've last done.
What you want is a comfortable environment that you feel you can invent in. Because film is such a lumbering, technical, huge, great Neanderthal thing, it's hard to create that little space of peace, and calm, and creativity, and ease. That's what you want the director to create for you, so that when you walk on the set, you forget all of that, and the fact that it's costing gazillions of dollars a second.
My dad's Russian. My mother's English. I would say my bottom half is Russian.
What's great in the modern world is that it's becoming easier and easier for people to create without having access to large sums of money. They need access to certain technologies, but the cost is far less than it used to be.
My fear of drama school is that the natural extraordinary but eccentric talent sometimes can't find its place in a drama school. And often that's the greatest talent. And it very much depends on the drama school and how it's run and the teachers. It's a different thing here in America as well because so many of your great actors go to class, which is sort of we don't do in England.
The important thing is to bring people with Parkinson's into our world and for the public to have a real understanding of it, as they've beginning to have with autism.
Women are always self-effacing and self-denying. There's a term that enrages me, and I always used to swear that I'd never play characters described that way. The term is "long-suffering."
I'm not a communist, of course. But I do think that everything is down to economics. Capitalism doesn't change.
What I feel personally and what I can act are two different things. Maybe one of the great pleasures of my job is being able to inhabit worlds that you are never going to inhabit personally.
I couldn't handle the rules the Queen has to live by at all, and very few of us could. It's a golden cage, really. You're never alone in that role - you are always surrounded by security.
Once a film gets into production, the actors sometimes begin to have more input than a writer does.
I always tell my husband, 'That's it, I quit, I've done all I wanted,' and he's just like, 'Yeah, yeah. Sure.'
As you get older naked stuff [on film] gets easier. It's more to do with the role than what men in the audience think. There's a liberation about it.
Girls go out together to see a chick flick or something. I loathe, I hate, chick flicks.
I always love working with young actors, because there's always something to learn. It's always exciting to see the next generation and how they approach things and what's great about them and what's not so great about them.
Los Angeles is Hollywood and Hollywood is Hollywood Blvd. It's the first thing you want to see. It's the only thing really that you know about as far as Los Angeles is concerned. And so you go and you look at Joan Crawford's hands and feet and the whole history of American filmmaking is encapsulated in that one little area on that one street. That street, to me, has always been the street of dream.
I am for peace and all kinds of ways because the total reality is that you never quite, at least in my experience, you never quite get to be peaceful in the profession that we have all chosen. It's a constant yearning, a constant reaching out for the unreachable. And so you never quite find peace within yourself. You are always questioning yourself and challenging yourself and feeling that you would fall short.
I wonder what it means when Americans say I'm an American. In Britain the culture is basically the same from one end of the country to the other. And when I came here and I saw Americans who live, I don't know, in you know, Northwestern California as opposed to Americans who live in Louisiana, as opposed to Americans who live in the Nevada desert. English even is literally a picture that I have in my mind of an oak tree in the field, a single oak in a green field. And also when I think of my Russian roots, it's the landscape that I connect with as more than maybe the poetry or the drama.
When I was doing Shakespeare and I had spent a lot of time and effort in trying to become a great Shakespearean actress. That was how I started my career, was in the theater doing Shakespeare. And my ambition was to be a great classical actress. That was what I wanted more than anything. So, I really pursued that in the first four years of my career. And it was an uphill struggle. It really was. Shakespeare's difficult and Shakespeare in a big theater is even more difficult. So, anyway, it was a struggle for me.
