Miriam Margolyes

"I was in my late twenties when I told my mother. [...] I spoke to her about an affair with a woman and three days later she had this stroke."

"I now regret it because it caused the person I loved the most pain she could not bear. I should have been aware that to tell her was very wrong. It also hurts me that she was not then able to live to see my success."

"[On mortality] If you are a Jew, and I am, it is not a subject that is ever far away. The Holocaust, in which I lost no one I knew, scarred me forever. And my life is informed by knowledge of it. I'm a jolly little soul but at the back of the jollity there is a knowledge of despair."

"The umbilical cord was never completely cut, metaphorically speaking, so I still feel massively connected to them long after their deaths. But I also happen to think that being an only child is inevitably damaging in some way because it too intensely focuses you on your parents and deprives young people of the socialising they must experience in order to fruit properly. I was terribly anxious to make friends; and I'm still needing people rather more than I should be, even at this advanced age."

"[On the TV series Miriam's Big Fat Adventure] I've always been fat and you're not supposed to be fat, so my built-in rebellion starts with the very flesh that I inhabit."

"For 11 years they must have had intercourse but never complete[ly], but in the air raid, in the heat of the terror, I was created."

"Nobody thinks they've had the career they deserve. And I want to be as important as Judi and Maggie and all the others, you know. And I think I'm bloody good — but nobody else agrees with me."