Emily Mortimer

“My dad had this philosophy that if you tell children they're beautiful and wonderful then they believe it, and they will be. So I never thought I was unattractive. But I was never one of the girls at school who had lots of boyfriends.”

“In my first few years as an actor, I took one terrible TV job after another. But even as I laughed off my awful roles and made fun of myself to friends, my work made me cringe - I dreaded anyone's seeing it. I was crushed that I wasn't doing anything I was proud of.”

“I am a good mother and I feel proud about it.”

“Lots of people there seemed to be in denial, in absolute denial, of death - everybody's pretending that death doesn't happen in L.A.; if you do enough exercise and take enough wheatgrass and have your pill every day, you might not die.”

“I borrowed my friend's car the other day in an attempt to persuade my husband that we needed a car and literally this is true, in the first day of borrowing the car, I got three tickets and I rear-ended it.”

“New York is great, but I miss L.A. - I feel like there was something exotic about L.A. that I kind of underestimated at the time. It was very unfamiliar to me.”

“Accents are very tangible, blessedly, and if you have to do one, it's a way of getting into character. I can read it through a few times and pretend I know what I'm doing!”

“It's dangerous talking about yourself too much because you find yourself talking in sound bites.”

“Some people come alive at night. I'm hopeless by 9 p.m. Coffee and Cadbury buy me an extra half hour. Often I can't get my clothes off I'm so far gone.”

“I think half the time I just assume I don't really know what I'm doing - you have to do that to a certain extent, but you don't have to think you're an idiot savant.”

“I was determined not to become an American citizen but I did it for completely cynical reasons: to avoid paying inheritance tax in the U.S.”