Tara Fitzgerald

“On Saturday morning I rise at about seven o'clock and start thinking about the day ahead and perhaps make a short list of things to do.”

“In the end, bad things happening can teach you good things.”

“I would willingly have laid down my life for my father.”

“I was intrigued by this woman I play in 'Requiem,' who operates independently.”

“I love running. It's so good for your mental health, your confidence, everything.”

“My mother, Sarah Fitzgerald, is Irish and a portrait photographer, and my English father, Michael Callaby, was an artist.”

“I was very insecure.”

“You fall in love with everything about a job when you're doing it. You give yourself to it, then move on to the next thing.”

“I like to think everyone gets married with the best intentions, hoping it will last forever.”

“I coped well enough. But I'd say my shyness or interior personality meant I didn't grab hold of things that someone with a more forceful personality might have.”

“I've always felt socially awkward and you can cover it up with a veneer to some degree and the formality of a lot of social events hides your awkwardness.”

“I tend to play independent-minded people.”

“I've secretly harboured a desire to direct for a quite a long time. It's so much more challenging. As an actor you might be involved in a number of levels but as director you've got to oversee everything.”

“I rarely make good friends on film sets. I'll meet the same actors on different projects every few years, but in the interim we just get on with our own lives. I hope this means I don't make enemies, because I certainly don't go out deliberately to do so. But I'm sure they're lurking out there somewhere.”

“I remember being told that around the 50 mark, I'd be in the wasteland and I'd have to wait until my sixties when, if I was lucky, I'd get granny roles. But, actually, I'm finding the older I get, the more interesting my career becomes - which is rather wonderful, isn't it?”

“I'm loving being in the West End. There's something marvellous about Covent Garden in the summer. There's such an infusion of people and tourists. It's vibrant and exotic.”

“When I was nine I had a crush on a boy, and he wrote another girl a love letter. She tore it up. Two boys told me the letter was to me, so I picked up the pieces and read it, and went to him as though he'd written it to me. He said, 'I could never love you because you're too ugly.'”

“I believe in energetic fields that can cause things to happen. I haven't seen anything, but I've experienced things, felt things.”

“An uncle I loved got me into Fred Astaire when I was young. We had a scratchy old album of the 'Top Hat' musical. I'd pretend I could tap-dance and my uncle would say: 'Go, Tara, go!'”

“Actors sometimes say they can't do something because their character would never do that. The director Suri Krishnamma once told me he found that strange. 'Most mornings,' he said, 'I have a cup of tea - but occasionally I have coffee.' It reminded me that we're all capable of anything, really.”