Jane Asher

“I do find modern jazz quite tricky.”

“My parents were not theatrical at all.”

“I know some actresses who used to be older than me who are now younger than me - I don't know how they do it.”

“I learnt basic cookery by watching my mum.”

“I think one wants lots of different lives.”

“There's also something of an illusion in that, you can perhaps record a TV thing one month and complete a book the next and then be in a play. Then, if they all come out at once, it looks as if you're actually juggling a million things.”

“Listening to my regular favourites - Mozart, Beethoven, Brahms and so on - I always feel, quite misguidedly, that nothing can be too bad if such beauty and brilliance exists in the world.”

“The rehearsal time is almost my favourite part of being an actress, particularly if you're working on a play that hasn't been done before.”

“Having cakes as a business certainly changes things for me - I don't now sit at home doing a cake for the fun of it anymore. But it's an extremely happy and pleasureable business to run because people are generally buying cakes for celebrations.”

“I enjoy the crafts on the show enormously, too, when we have experts in showing how to make things. You watch them thinking you'll go home and do the things yourself, which is fun. Some I have done myself later on.”

“I was always very determined, as was my husband, that we wouldn't let any of our children act when they were young.”

“It makes me upset, if not angry, when people assume that there can be no morality without a religious framework. If there's a moral framework without all that religious stuff, it's more valuable.”

“We get a lot of overseas people wanting to order cakes.”

“As a child, I wanted to marry a farmer, but no doubt the reality would have been very different to the idyll in my head.”

“I look at myself objectively and in a way I see myself as a commodity. Your name becomes somehow outside yourself. Now, when I'm at home being Mrs. Scarfe, that's when I'm most myself.”

“Thank God I've never had the sort of intense fame that means you can't walk up the road. That sort of blazing stardom must be difficult to cope with and maintain; my career has just bubbled along happily.”

“I try to be classic without being mumsy.”

“I'm not advocating we should all be back in the kitchen and cooking all the time, because life's too short and we've got more interesting things to do. But to rediscover the intense pleasure of making a cake and putting it down on the table is ridiculously satisfying, out of all proportion to the work.”

“People ask what the secret of a happy marriage is. If there is one, it's 'don't talk about it.'”

“I don't agree with the whole 'my mother's my friend' approach, because you're their mum and there has to be a difference between the generations.”