Diane Cilento

“I don't think in my family anyone looked after anyone. It didn't matter how old they were.”

“I spoke French a bit, and I could speak a bit of this and that, and when you were taught those things by people who couldn't really do it, you can do some pretty wonderfully, imaginative horrific things to teachers.”

“My mother felt it was time that I had some parental control, so I went off to America and went to New York.”

“I was a hard worker, and I always knew my lines.”

“I learnt the theory of movement, which I still teach sometimes. I was very, very ambitious to learn a skill.”

“Suddenly I had a contract and I was earning lots of money.”

“I was often very, incredibly naughty, and if I didn't come home at tea time I used to be sent to bed without any dinner. But people used to bring me things: I was better fed in bed.”

“Very quickly, without really looking back or trying, I was just suddenly lifted into another sphere.”

“At boarding school you had to wear your name across your chest and your back, and obviously I had a pretty funny name. It wasn't Brown or Smith or Hughes.”

“I had a place in England and was commuting from England to Australia, which is pretty stupid, but after two years I sort of knew what I wanted to do, more or less.”

“It was a very odd household, because the grandmothers were so different. Both of them had their own pianos. So it would be duelling pianos by grandmothers.”

“Once, the parental bed collapsed because all the children sat on it at once.”

“The most surprising thing for my mother and father was when I was actually earning more money than them by the time I was about 18. They thought I was going to be the ne'er do well, who they'd have to keep worrying about.”

“Blank House was exactly a nice empty sheet where nothing was accountable because you were so naughty that you were in Blank House.”

“When I did Taming of the Shrew, I was very tired, and I decided to have a holiday and make a documentary.”

“Both my parents were doctors, and my mother had her surgery in the house. There were six children.”

“If there was a distraction I'd get up and jump out the window. I was quite out of hand. In schools like that I don't think they expect that girls are going to behave in such an outrageous fashion.”

“If you've got a lot of children, I think you let the other children bring them up more and you just sort of step in and do stuff like every now and again.”

“I got through my teen years by being a bit of a clown.”

“I didn't know what to do with myself. I wasn't excited by the teaching of the school. If they'd been intent on really teaching you things, I would have been a little more attentive.”