Nigel Hawthorne

“It was hard to get work when I was a young actor.”

“I would never have told my father a lie. We were brought up to be very truthful. I would never lie today. It's impossible.”

“I am 65 now and the world is just ahead of me at a time when most people are retiring.”

“Acting gives me the opportunity to be fascinating on stage or, I suppose; properly speaking, pretend to be fascinating.”

“My private life has never been a secret. I've never been a closet queen.”

“I went into acting because I was hiding from myself, and although acting has become more of a habit now, I think I am still hiding.”

“We've had other things come up in their place, but I don't think' anything beats morals.”

“If people crowd me too much, I can't work.”

“I would never shortchange an audience. I believe in doing every single performance with as much integrity and concentration and feeling as I can muster.”

“I did what every other actor did: there were agents all the way up the Charing Cross Road and up St. Martin's Lane, and I would go out each day and do the agents - walk into these buildings, along their corridors, bang on these doors and say, 'Anything today?'”

“I do a play a year, or every 18 months, and you get your comedies and your dramas, but you hardly get anything that touches some kind of core in you.”

“I've never been afraid of being vulnerable on stage. It's a large part of life, and I think it's being dishonest to disallow an audience to see that side.”

“There is nobody on earth who could totally impersonate Jack Lewis, because you may look like him from the front or from the side, you may sound like him, but there'll be all sorts of aspects of you that will be very dissimilar to the man.”

“On the stage you can get away with imposing the emotions on yourself, but with film it really has to come from inside. It's much more intense.”

“My father was a man very much like Arthur Winslow. He was a very stern man and very much the authoritarian figure.”

“Just as Jack Lewis could go through a whole life without meeting someone that he loved, so you can go through whole career on the stage, never meeting a play that says the kind of things you feel deeply about!”

“Alan Bennett is a very quirkish man. He laughs in a self-effacing way, which stops you getting close. If you embrace him, he'll laugh in an embarrassed way and pull away, not to shrug you off, but because he finds it awkward.”

“I used to get notes from directors, 'Please, Nigel, smile at the curtain calls.' I hate them so much.”

“The best way to get people to accept you is to move about the community and show them there's nothing to be afraid of.”

“In my mornings I can do what I like - go to art galleries, museums and things, go to lunch with people.”