Roger Allam

“I began getting these terrible headaches and I thought 'Oh great, death.' But it was just tension and tiredness.”

“At one stage, I wanted to be a folk singer.”

“I don't know who can constantly afford to go and see things. A play, which has five people in it and one set and it cost you 60 quid? And you're in a theatre that really hasn't had a great deal of money spent on it in the last 50 or 60 years? It's kind of weird.”

“I did hardly any academic work. I learnt a fair amount, though.”

“Learn your lines so well that you never have to worry about them.”

“Getting a good education was of immense importance to my parents.”

“It's nice to have the creature comforts of home.”

“At school I was a disaster academically but being involved in drama helped me to find another pathway into things.”

“My ballroom dancing skills are completely non-existent.”

“In 1983 I was still playing small to middling parts.”

“What is nice about doing a long-running show is finding a language that gives it some depth.”

“Playing a villain would be great.”

“I've had some bad reviews, but not as bad as the things I could imagine for myself.”

“As so many people seem to have done, I kind of fell in love with Willy Brandt.”

“I invented this wonderful death scene for Javert of going down on my knees and then leaning back like a limbo dancer to make it look as if I was falling off a bridge. I did it eight times a week for nearly a year and I've had trouble with my knees ever since - they don't even allow me to jog these days.”

“Writing opera off as intrinsically elitist is absurd.”

“I've been choreographed in various musicals before. So I'm not completely two left feet.”

“People always use power, that's the unsurprising thing. They use it to try to sleep with who they want to sleep with - women as well as men do that - but I don't understand violence.”

“My parents both came from working-class backgrounds, my father particularly. He came from a very poor family, 12 of them lived in a little three-bedroom terrace house in Fulham, it was very small with an outside loo and a tin bath on the scullery wall.”

“I like the fact that in the theatre nothing is ever finished because you're going to do it all over again tomorrow, whereas in telly once it's wrapped and in the can, that's it.”