Roger Allam

“Try not to worry about embarrassing yourself. That's a lifetime's task.”

“I was in 'Babes in the Wood' at the Citizens Theatre in Glasgow in the Eighties. I was the villain - the wicked Sheriff of Nottingham.”

“Practice, learn the lines, work hard, don't be too respectful. Sometimes we can get too hung up on the fact that the material of the play is very finely wrought language.”

“I've never been to Barcelona, I'd like to go there; also South America.”

“When you are doing pantomime, you're not immersing yourself in anything terribly deep.”

“Life will go on - until it doesn't.”

“It's lovely going to Oxford, it's very difficult to film there as you're doing a period drama in a city which is very crowded.”

“I have a glass of wine. Red. Generally when I'm cooking.”

“I like to do a wide variety of things, and acting, particularly in the theatre, has given me that opportunity.”

“I've been saying for about 20 years, 'When am I going to get my cop show?'”

“A lot of actors are relatively shy people, surprisingly, so acting is a way of not being shy - and being paid not to be shy.”

“I can do posh.”

“As soon as you have two small children, they take up a lot of time and energy.”

“With those long American TV contracts you think, 'yes, at the end of that I'd be rich.' But at the same time you feel inside you a kind of death, because I enjoy playing lots of different characters.”

“Theatre has been a part of my education as much as anything else.”

“My chin - I've got another one underneath the first one.”

“One of the great things about doing a play, repeating it over and over again, is that you can practice. And you can get really quite good at it for a while.”

“I have got a big deep voice, and that comes in useful for villains.”

“Be ambitious. The great actor, director and playwright Ann Jellicoe commissioned writers like Howard Barker and David Edgar, and put on magnificent, large-scale plays in Dorset that involved the whole community.”

“Bizarrely, someone involved in the children's show 'Sarah and Duck,' which I narrate, recently found a coat with my name on it in a secondhand shop. It's the coat I wore as Theseus in the 'Dream.' So it's back in my possession after all these years, which is rather strange and wonderful.”