Zitat des Tages von Simon Callow:
When the BBC decided to bring Doctor Who back as a feature film a few years ago, one national newspaper ran a poll to ask its readers who should be the new Doctor, and I topped it.
I get sent a lot of scripts which feature him as a kind of all-purpose Victorian literary character and really understand little, if anything, about him, his life or his books.
Bleak House is just the most astounding piece of work. There's huge, visionary poetry in it.
Childhood didn't have a big influence on me, really - in fact I spent most of it plotting how to escape.
I don't practise any religion but I am deeply interested in the answers that mankind has come up with to explain the human situation.
You could say Shakespeare is so extraordinary precisely because he was so ordinary. He had all the usual anxieties and understandings of what it is to have children, lose children, get married, struggle to make a living and so on.
I hated Sundays when I was growing up in Streatham, south London. Everything closed down and stopped.
He invented this idea of telling the life story of a great writer through becoming his characters and becoming him. It was such a pleasure and I thought we must find another writer.
Like many Catholics, I was very affected by the personality of Jesus and that impression, pious as it was, has stayed with me.
He always describes his characters' voices and their physique so brilliantly. As people have said, they are cartoons, caricatures. They're grotesques really.
He spent hours and hours and hours practising these conjuring tricks. It's just such a curious thing.
I don't have any big regrets.
Shakespeare wrote all there is that we need to know about dementia in 'King Lear.'
I am never bored, never short of anything to do and I don't even ever feel lonely. I am quite gregarious and I get out and about a lot, but sometimes it is just wonderful to be on your own.
When children have grieving parents it's also common for them to feel an obligation to cheer them up and make them happy.
I would say critically of myself that I am somebody without secrets. Sometimes acting depends on you having a secret. I don't think I've ever had that.
Shakespeare speaks for the human heart but Dickens speaks for the social man and for injustices.
Jesus is absolutely at the centre of Western civilisation and part of my fascination with him is, why? What is it about this particular man and his story?
Having caught a glimpse of what I might be able to do with my talent, I feel a tremendous obligation to try to fulfill it.
I went to Queen's University Belfast and stayed nine months, then I ran away to be an actor.