Quotes

[on her role in the Harry Potter film] I have a nervous breakdown in the film and in one scene I get to stand at the top of the stairs waving an empty sherry bottle which is, of course, a typical scene from my daily life, so isn't much of a stretch.

I can't stand this new culture of the instant disposable celebrity. It's all so vulgar.

I am who I am and there is nothing I can do about that.

I have periods of intense activity, then stop. My ideal is to work hard in the morning until I pick Gaia up from school. Just putting an empty square in my diary seems to make a space in my head, too. You have to be very good at saying no.

My appearance has changed a lot over the years, but it has far more to do with how I feel about being a woman. I've never thought of myself as vain. When I was at Cambridge, I shaved my head and wore baggy clothes. What I did was to desexualise myself. It was partly to do with the feminism of that time: militant and grungy. That's all changed now, though I don't think it is liberating to get your tits out. I don't hold with that. But I am much more comfortable with being a woman now than I was in my twenties.

But when I lose my temper, I find it difficult to forgive myself. I feel I've failed. I can be calm in a crisis, in the face of death or things that hurt badly. I don't get hysterical, which may be masochistic of me. But in small matters, I am not calm at all. My worst quality is impatience.

I mind having to look pretty, that's what I mind, because it is so much more of an effort.

Liam Neeson, quite frankly, is sex on legs. Always has been.

Children are much more understanding of the suddenness and arbitrariness of death than we are. The old fairy tales contain a lot of that, and we've stolen from them, just as they stole from Greek myth, which has that same mixture of pre-Christian chaos.

I've realized that in all the great stories, even if there's a happily-ever-after ending, there's something sad.

Acting simply cannot be about how you look. It would be very difficult to make a film where you have to be beautiful in every shot. You have to put so much effort into it; you have to hold your head at particular angles, put the light in a certain way and I don't like acting like that. I like to act unconscious of how I look.

The first time I was nominated, I didn't know anything about the Oscars. That was almost 15 years ago. I just did Oscar week and enjoyed it very much because I was with my mum. Even so, each time it's happened I've come down with some ghastly infection. It is overwhelming for people. It has nothing to do really at all with your performance. It comes down to if you get an Oscar for your film, then the revenue for your film goes up. They mean a great deal. I can't deny it.

I'm very lucky I write as well. I don't see how I could be as effective a mother as I'd like to be if I had to go away and act all the time. So I've sort of pulled back from acting, which is fine, because I've found over the years - and this was a surprise to me - that I can get the same kind of creative satisfaction from writing as I have heretofore gotten out of acting. It's very encouraging, really.

[1992] We just did Hamlet with Sir John Gielgud and it was so luvvy it wasn't true.

[on the personality of P.L. Travers and Saving Mr. Banks (2013)] She is a rather extraordinary combination of things. I suppose that was the scary thing about playing her. In film, we often get to play someone who is emotionally or morally consistent in some way, and she was not consistent in any way.

My godfather said that 'story' was about taking the chaotic jigsaw of life, making it into a picture and putting a frame around it so that we could look at it, have control over it. Story and art are the humanizing elements in us.

[on being reminded she once claimed that picturing the men she had slept with helped her drift off] I haven't done that in a long time. I'm more likely to rehearse casserole recipes, which perhaps is a sad indictment of my state of mind.

Once you're a mom, you've been split into two people. Like Peter Pan and his shadow.

Th nanny story is essentially the western. It's the stranger from out of town who comes into the situation of conflict, solves the issues using unorthodox methods and then must depart. Shane and Buffalo Bill turn up as Nanny McPhee and Mary Poppins in the female world.

[Walt] Disney had a very Dickensian childhood. Disneyland was a way of rendering the world a safe place for himself and other children.

Why insist on building a new border between human beings in an ever-shrinking world where we are still struggling to live alongside each other?

[on her appearance on 'the red carpet', clad in a hot pink number] It's Stella McCartney. It was actually much shorter on the runway, but when I tried it on it was a bit mutton-dressed-as-a-lamb, so I had it lengthened. I like my legs but not the top bits very much.

I would rather have a root canal treatment for a year than go on Twitter or Facebook. The irony of Facebook is [that you speak out but] don't say it to anybody's face. It revolts me, repels me.

I have the same career trajectory as Maggie Smith. I was passionate about comedy. I wanted to be Lily Tomlin. I wanted that career. Write my own stuff and play it. And I did it for a while. I had my own series which was so badly reviewed by the critics I thought I can't do this anymore.

[on working with Tom Hanks in Saving Mr. Banks (2013)] It was such fun. You can imagine. He's a darling and such a good actor. We've known each other on a social level for some time and we always said "What can we do? What can we do?". And this turned up and it was sort of perfect.

To be perfectly frank, I sometimes think that the young must get very bored with the parts that they are required to play. It's not as though there are that many very complex, interesting roles for anyone. The guys are now required to stand around looking beautiful and be superheroes. And I'm very, very bored. They must be bored too. Where are all the dramas we used to love? Where are all the stories?

[on her career moments] I said to my agent, "I need to earn money. Get me a job." The first three that came up were a very, very old lady in a wheelchair, Bradley Cooper's mother, and Mother Theresa. I thought, "Well, clearly I have to do something to turn around the Nanny McPhee image as it's gone into people's minds and stayed there." In the end, other things turned up. It was very funny, but Mother Theresa would have just put the tin lid on it really.

When my mum was young, everyone wanted to be in their thirties. Now people are desperate to put the clock back, and there's something absolutely tragic about that. And the loss of our engagement with our aging and getting older and wiser and having more skills - a wider palette - we've lost that. We have granted youth power that it doesn't have.

Books are like people, in that they'll turn up in your life when you most need them.

Films are like history, and I think as people get older, they're so much more interesting. When you're doing theatre, people see the play, go home and don't remember it, but with film you can leave a lot of cannisters behind and can live in people's memories.

I never expected to be a film actress and I wasn't terribly ambitious about it. And film acting and stage acting are not the same thing. In the theatre, you have to wear all your energy on the outside in order to project the character to the guy in the back row, but if you do that for film, it's too much. You have to internalize because a thought can be translated by a muscle in your face, and a film audience will be able to read that.

[on renowned author E.M. Forster] I've always been fascinated by the 19th Century, and his characters walk right off the page.

I leaned an awful lot about screenwriting from Tutti Frutti (1987) - about how important the standard of screenwriting is. Tutti Frutti was some of the best material I've ever had to work on - just sublime. It's got comedy, tragedy, all the elements - but it's written in such a way that they can all live and subsist together, because they were written by a genius and not by somebody who thinks, "Now I'll do the sad bit." You see that in film after film and TV programme after TV programme, where it's writing by numbers. You look at Tutti Frutti and you say to every screenwriter, "Watch this."

I really loved Wonder Woman (2017). I thought it was witty and hopeful and delicately done and wonderfully acted. I did enjoy it so much, and I was not expecting to and came out feeling happy. (...) I liked that she had this very unfussed response to the men. She came from a matriarchal society and didn't have a problem with alpha males. That's not at all a typical role model for girls. She did have that incredible beauty. I'd have preferred if she were short, squat and Welsh. [2017]

I'm a bit bossy, and I have to say some people find it quite difficult to deal with. Mentioning no names, but my first husband.

My dad was ill for most of my childhood. He had his first heart attack when I was about six and later had a stroke, and he died at 52. And my Uncle James died when he was 51, and then my godfather, Ronald Eyre, not long afterwards. They were all the most wonderfully funny men, so I suppose I made some connection between wit and death.

I went to the Avignon Theatre Festival when I was 16 and I found a production of Andromache which I loved, and went to see many, many times, and I remember getting up in the middle of the night and writing to my father, and saying I really can't turn my back on this business. Because the people who came to our house were actors and directors, mostly that. Not many writers. Although some did come, Alan Bennett actually, and my Godfather was a writer/director called Ronald Eyre, who was a gay man from Bradford, hugely articulate and clever. So I was surrounded by creative people and I don't think it would ever have gone any other way, really.

[on religion versus science] I am an atheist myself, but I believe in spiritual life being important… and the reason that I am an atheist in so far as the world religions that we have, is because I have seen them oppress so many women for so long. So, to me, religion is the history of the oppression of women.