Jeremy Irons

“So I continued through my next school, which takes me up to the age of 17, moving from the bottom stream of one year into the bottom stream of the next year, all the way through. I showed other talents which gave me self-respect, which is fine.”

“So the better my partner or my opposition, however you like to think about it, the better my game.”

“It's always great to play a man who sets himself up to be punctured.”

“A trip to the mainland was a big event and happened maybe once a year, although now you can get across in a speed boat in seven minutes but then it was a long way away.”

“You ask my wife or my two sons, and they'll tell you that I ain't free with the money.”

“Americans enjoy uniformity in a way that the British don't; they wanted everybody of a sort of nice chorus line height and here I was, this person who was a good three inches taller than anyone else on the end of the line.”

“Peter Brook's 'Midsummer Night's Dream,' I remember seeing. That was pretty early on. And suddenly, I realized how theatrical Shakespeare is, how alive, how wonderful it is when it's opened up by a great director and a great company.”

“I believe inanimate objects have a spirit.”

“The film business has changed hugely. You seem to spend about 30 per cent of the time producing the films and 70 per cent talking about it.”

“I've always tended to play people who relish playing against the rules.”

“I don't watch a lot of television. I try to watch all the good movies, but I've got about twenty of these television series that I should be watching. I haven't seen 'The Wire.' I haven't seen 'Mad Men.' I haven't seen Kevin's thing. What's that called? 'House of Cards.' I hear it's wonderful.”

“There's a great thing about amateur sport: it is purer. And the athletes are not open to so much pressure with amateur sport.”

“I love touching. I always touch people.”

“I was not naturally intellectual, but somebody whose interest had to be whetted, still the case sadly.”

“I constantly experience failure in that my work is never as good as I want it to be. So I live with failure.”

“My father was a CPA. He worked hard in the aircraft industry, and would come home more and more infrequently. He was about to leave my mother, which he did when I was 15.”

“I have played characters where I haven't been absorbed - you know, what I call a typical film leading man role where you just have to look gorgeous and be attractive and charming. It bores me. I like a bit of dirt, a bit of sand in the oyster.”

“However, I wasn't very good at the sciences, or didn't have a lot of help in the sciences or something but certainly didn't set science for my A level. And when I came to take my A levels I didn't get a good enough result to go to University.”

“The danger of dioxins in our environment, our food chain, and our bodies is difficult to illustrate, since they are not visible to the naked eye. My time in Vietnam allowed me to see the result of large quantities of them and therefore understand better the insidiousness of the smaller quantities that have found their way into our lives and bodies.”

“I do this work, but I am uncomfortable in situations where you're hyped into something you're not. Just because you're in a long limo doesn't mean anything.”