Romola Garai

“I am always naturally drawn to heroines that have human flaws because I enjoy people that have lived their life with courage and make big successes and big failures.”

“I wish I was a more adventurous person in a way. But actually, security is a really big deal for me.”

“There's nothing very interesting about my life.”

“When I was a child, I always wanted to be funny and to please people in my family. As you grow up that instinct becomes more refined, but it's still there.”

“I was mad until I was about 25. Completely out of control with my emotions. Everything that happened to me was a tragedy. I've been much happier over 25.”

“The last thing a director needs is an actress who feels an ownership towards a particular character.”

“I think with the best actors, emotion is something that has no kind of check in them.”

“When you talk to women who were working as print journalists or in broadcasting in the '50s, and then you talk to women who were working in the late '60s, there's an enormous difference. There had already been a huge transition. Then, of course, you get well into the '70s and there were women with children working.”

“I get grumpy about the innate conservatism of our tastes; I love bold theatre, and I get annoyed when a heritage piece is really successful.”

“If you are a 19-year-old woman, there are very specific things that directors and the people in positions of power in the industry - who tend to be older men - are going to want you to be and do. They are not going to want some chatty, difficult, slightly spoilt girl.”

“I love science fiction. I read a lot of science fiction.”

“I've always scribbled, and I still do it. I've written numerous scripts for films for which I think I'd be perfect as the complex, intelligent and, yes, modern heroine. Embarrassingly bad, all of them. I've had to come to terms with the fact that I'm not a writer.”

“There are people who you see on screen and think, 'Wow, that's a slim person,' and in the flesh they look nearly dead.”

“I want people to think I'm sexy, but to know also that I've got an ordinary body and not feel intimidated.”

“I have always been interested in gender politics, so I'm not that keen on doing things that don't represent a truth about women.”

“I'd always try to get a C, maybe a B. Other girls would trot off a brilliant essay and go off to Oxford; I'd think: 'Where is the justice?' I took A-levels in English, history and theatre studies and got three Bs.”

“I just don't believe you're capable of being an actor unless you have a desire to experience your emotions in a public way.”

“We live in a society where children are expected to become adults overnight.”

“Films about women and their concerns are seen as frivolous, limited and, most damaging of all, niche.”

“You don't have to conform to a very specific aesthetic today, whereas 1950s women definitely had to.”