Maggie Smith

“I like being outside and working with the elements. The elemental aspects of it. The physicality of it.”

“When I started acting almost 50 years ago, it wasn't about fame. It was about acting.”

“It seems to me there is a change in what audiences want to see. I can only hope that's correct, because there's an awful lot of people of my age around now and we outnumber the others.”

“Some people say you have to fight cancer. But it was fighting me. The cure was worse than the disease, and it left me totally exhausted and depressed. I just hid myself away in my daughter-in-law's flat.”

“An actor is somebody who communicates someone else's words and emotions to an audience. It's not me. It's what writers want me to be.”

“I longed to be bright and most certainly never was. I was rather hopeless, I suspect.”

“I had been feeling a little rum. I didn't think it was anything serious because years ago I felt a lump and it was benign. I assumed this would be too. It kind of takes the wind out of your sails, and I don't know what the future holds, if anything.”

“I wanted to be a serious actress, but of course that didn't really happen.”

“When you get into the granny era, you're lucky to get anything.”

“The chemotherapy was very peculiar, something that makes you feel much worse than the cancer itself, a very nasty thing. I used to go to treatment on my own, and nearly everybody else was with somebody. I wouldn't have liked that. Why would you want to make anybody sit in those places?”

“I tend to head for what's amusing because a lot of things aren't happy. But usually you can find a funny side to practically anything.”

“I believe that I am past my prime. I had reckoned on my prime lasting till I was at least fifty.”

“I don't think films about elderly people have been made very much.”

“Old people are scary. And I have to face it. I am old and I am scary.”

“Listen, I must be 110 by now. Granny is going to kick the bucket at some point.”

“The thing is, often press people ask questions that are so personal that even your nearest and dearest wouldn't ask them.”

“There's this wonderful first assistant and he'll be saying, 'Now Harry goes down among the dragons.' You have to hold yourself together. Because if you lose it for a second then you're sunk.”

“I do love comedy, and when it's a comedy moment and you can make people laugh, of course it is wonderful.”

“I like the ephemeral thing about theatre, every performance is like a ghost - it's there and then it's gone.”

“People think of you differently if you've been in their homes. They think they own you because they watched you while they were eating dinner, or they can turn you up or down, or even freeze you.”