Rory Kinnear

“If you lose a parent, no matter at what age, every five or 10 years you have a different way of missing them and a different way of getting on with your life.”

“In some ways, I've been left with this great 'idolic' image of my father, but there's a sense of absence, too. You miss his advice and, also, his getting to know the person I have become.”

“Without being overtly political about it, if people with severe disabilities are calculated in societal terms purely as a monetised unit, in terms of how much they cost in terms of care, you lose an important sense of who they are and the effect they have.”

“When I was about 12, I spent the summer writing four plays on my dad's old typewriter for a school play competition. And I wrote little comic bits at secondary school and at university.”

“I'm glad to have shown myself able to do other things rather than people thinking, 'Oh, he'll just do the same as his dad.' Dad was a brilliant actor, but it just so happened he was five foot five and a half, fat and bald.”

“I love music, and I once thought about doing a choral scholarship, but the people put me off.”

“Drama aids self-discovery like nothing else. In removing it from our schools, we remove the inestimable benefits of it from our society. No amount of studying oxbow lakes was ever going to help me emotionally through the death of my father.”

“The truth is that from the age of 14, I felt about 40, and for that reason, I felt that I would never succeed as an actor until my looks caught up with my actual age.”

“I always loved acting - though what I did in my teens was probably more eclat than elan. But I wasn't sure about doing it professionally.”

“The more rarefied a life you live, the easier it is to think that those who don't share it could be demonised. To find the common humanity becomes more of a struggle the more you surround yourself with nice things.”

“Having gone to a public school, I thought I knew about posh people. But I didn't know anything until I went to Oxford.”

“Both Othello and Iago seem a bit cracked. If you spend 15 years being responsible for death and destruction, that sense of suppressed horror is strong.”