A biography for Samantha Bondhasn’t been written yet.
“I lost a girlfriend when I was in my 30s. She was 46. It all sounds so trite, but I put a Post-it on my dressing-room wall. It said, 'The past is history. The future is a mystery. This moment is a gift, which is why it's called the present.'”
“Not a lot of people know this, but I'm very good at mathematics. When I was an angry teenager, I used to sit in my room and do quadratic equations to calm myself down.”
“It's one of the oldest theatrical adages: never work with children or animals.”
“I managed to slip two children out in the middle of my career and have been lucky with all the work.”
“I'm very shocked when I look at television and I see such an aggressive youth and image obsession in the representation of women on our screens.”
“Agatha Christie holds special personal memories for me because my mum, a television producer called Pat Sandys, had been the first person to persaude the Agatha Christie estate to put one of her stories on T.V.”
“I grew up without the rose-tinted look at the profession many of my friends had, but I've been very lucky playing major roles in 'An Ideal Husband', 'Arcadia' and 'The Memory of Water'.”
“I've been married to the same man - even after the separation - longer than most people in this business. I'm sick to death of people mentioning it.”
“I think that as you get older, you become aware of everything that could go wrong.”
“If you put people up on pedestals, there's only one way for them to go, and that is down.”
“The middle-aged woman is the ground bed of the audience that watches television, and yet they are absolutely invisible.”
“I have to be careful what I eat before going onstage, to avoid an upset stomach.”
“Inside my heart, there's a 12-year-old girl who has always wanted to be Ginger Rogers.”
“I get so nervous before I go on stage that I can never eat very much, so I'm always completely starving afterwards and dying for a bowl of pasta.”
“If I pop off and do something drastic, everyone's going to realise because they know I'm 50. Anyway, middle-aged women are sensational.”
“As a child, I always remember our home, which was a flat just on the Barnes side of Hammersmith Bridge in London, buzzing with actors such as Patrick McGee and Peter Bowles. We were a family who were always on the go.”
“My father Philip was an actor and appeared in everything from 'The Onedin Line' to 'Hedda Gabler' with Dame Diana Rigg.”
“'Downton' is one of the best jobs in the world, and I'm looking forward to the next series for Maggie Smith's wicked sense of humour.”