actresses-from-the-united-kingdom

"If everybody likes you it means that you are super boring. There has to be somebody who does not like you. I am very happy that there are people who don't like me. I am even happier when I convert the dislikes to likes."

"I was at my house having a perfectly normal afternoon sitting in my living room when I felt something watching me. I looked up and saw two men on the terrace of my neighbouring building with a camera right at me! In what world is this ok and allowed? This is a gross invasion of someone's privacy. There's a line you just cannot cross and it's safe to say all lines were crossed today."

"The only thing I can do is build a body of work which hopefully proves I belong in this industry. I always make it a point to acknowledge the easy start I got at the beginning of my career. And sure, it will get you in the room, but then it's up to you to work that room. The audience is actually the best judge of talent. You could come from a background that props you up but the audience will ultimately decide whether or not you belong there."

"I want to be a diva and I want to be glamorous and at the top of all fashion portals. But at the same time I also want to be at the top of all film awards. I want to have the balance of both worlds."

"I choose films the same way I've been doing it for years. I just keep it flavorful. I want the flavors to be different from each other. It's to satisfy my extremely impatient, monotony-abhorring kind of brain. It's not at all calculated."

"Working in Hollywood on an English language movie for me sort of means starting from scratch, reaching out to an audience that is perhaps not familiar with my work, having worked ten years in the Indian film industry. You can get very comfortable where you are. I'm naturally more drawn towards whatever makes me uncomfortable. It's a way for me to compete with myself."

"Doubt is the key to knowledge. Doubt makes you push, doubt makes you work hard, doubt makes you not take the opportunity for granted."

"My parents struggled to get to a point where I could enjoy their privilege. I do recognize that. If tomorrow I don’t do well and I stop getting films, I’ll still always acknowledge the fact that I got such great opportunities, so I can never really complain."

"She's the first person I felt parental about. She's the first person I felt like I had a parental instinct for. I love her and the country knows she's one of our finest actors. I have a tremendous amount of love, respect and admiration and I'm allowed to say what I want about her."

"When I see her work, when I see her act, even in life, what she gives is something that I'm aspiring to for myself."

"Cherophobia is the fear of being too happy and thinking that you'll lose it all. I have cherophobia in both my personal and professional life. I try to not be aware of this fame because I fear I will lose it. I don't live in the moment because I am constantly thinking about what if it all goes away."

"I don't think I am the same person. Life has so much more meaning and I think actors can get really self-obsessed if they are constantly thinking about themselves. Now when there is another being in your life suddenly it is like Alia who? It is Raha, Raha, Raha! The focus is on her."

"The feeling that I won't be able to do it is always a good feeling. It puts me in an uncomfortable space. And lots of interesting things can be explored and discovered when you are out of your comfort zone, and when you are terrified."

"You feel grateful for failure at times because that's what gives you a certain vigour. You feel grateful for a heartbreak or disappointment because that's what makes you value the opposite."

"We have a certain societal norm in which we have to be put together, we have to be right, we have to be quiet, we have to be simple, we have to be soft-spoken, we have to be well-dressed. We have to be so many things. Just bringing everything: the vulnerability, the jealousy, the lows, the highs, the real things that we are afraid of even thinking. If you bring that to the forefront on the big screen, then the person watching you from the audience will feel like, 'OK, I'm not the only one.'."

"I don’t like to sort of break down process or talk about process because I feel like art is not like science. It doesn’t have a method to it, you can have a method to your discipline and to the way you approach your work, but at the end of the day imbibing a personality or behaving or talking or feeling doesn’t have a process."

"Nature has a way of dealing with your brain when you have a child – it turns it to porridge."

"You realise retrospectively mother nature has made you absolutely focused and cow-like. Then you realise your child is infinitely cleverer than you will ever be, and wittier and funnier, and you like being in its company and so you think, 'I haven't done a bad job, really."

"I stepped back from acting because I was bringing up a child. You can't do both."

"My sensitivity to prejudice is high because I was brought up in South Africa. My awareness of all this crap came earlier, and it's stayed with me, and it's why I'm militantly liberal."

"Theatre is a white invention, a European invention, and white people go to it. It's in their DNA. It starts with Shakespeare."

"The apartheid government was frightened of ridicule. Everyone is frightened of laughter."

"The only times I saw black people were once in Adelaide and once at the other end of the continent, in both cases looking desperate on the street, sitting in huddles drinking beer. I realised what Australians had done to their indigenous population, to their other: they'd disappeared them."

"Life and art get mixed up sometimes – it's what actors draw on."

"In South Africa we were criminal, beastly, vile and disgusting, but we didn't commit genocide."

"Susan Shaw’s story is one of the saddest in British film. She rose from a working-class South London background to become one of the most popular and beautiful British actresses of the 1940s and 50s, but the misery of the last twenty years of her life made her death a merciful release."

"Any government would be really embarrassed to ban Shakespeare."

"You can't envy something you can't be, can you? You sat and admired what was emerging."

"The whole purpose of an actor's life is to find great writing, and when it comes along you leap on it like a puppy on a slipper. You're avid – greedy – hungry – for great gobbets of good writing. That's all we live for."

"It's exactly at the moment that they want you most – at the end of the day when it's bathtime, storytime, bedtime – that's when you're walking out the door. I couldn't bear that brave little look as he said, 'Goodbye'. So I thought Josh is more important than a play."

"I remember being absolutely shocked in Australia at the absence of black people."

"Your birth is my birth; your death is my death."

"I think there are different ways to show solidarity. If you feel like you're able to go and do that, by all means do that to speak out."

"We’re all not warriors from Black Panther, we’re all not the Milaje. We cry, we bleed, we experience everything."

"Nothing gets me. Good or bad. Because I never look back. If you look back, you're going to be in trouble, you will suffer from depression, mental illness – no! Always look forward."

"I won. And I'm telling women that they can win."

"I am there to move society on and even though I get obstacles I will overcome them because I am working for good."

"I don't let the bad things eat me up, oh no. Because I'm not a victim. That's why people say to me, "When I see your smile I feel so happy, when I see your body, your aura, I feel as if I can cope." Because I’m Miss Optimist!"

"When you are black you carry your colour with you everywhere you go."

"I noticed that black girls never had names in movies. They were just "girl" I remember one instruction read "Enter girl, not very black.""

"[On limited opportunities for African Caribbean actresses in the UK] If you want to know how many black women are being employed, go to the BBC canteen."

"At that time, she didn’t have much ambition for her acting career, because of the kind of roles she was offered. I noticed that, if given a lot of dialogue, she would become very nervous; then I cut most of her lines, so she could concentrate on her body language, which is something she was very good at."

"I used to be an actress. After being away from film sets for 12 years, I no longer deserve to be called an actress!"

"Yet “Maggie” (as her fans affectionately call her) stands out against western clichés about Chinese actresses. No Orientalist fantasy, she is a modern Hong Kong woman, a complex mirror image of post-colonial dilemmas: displacement, racist misrepresentation and partial loss of cultural identity (she speaks English better than she can read Chinese characters). Unlike such mainland stars as Gong Li and Siqin Gaowa, she has never formally trained as an actress and her acting depends more on emotion than technique."

"I have no regrets as an actress, even though I have been one for 15 years and don't think that all the films I've done are that good."

"I like the idea of writing and directing something. That would be my goal in life. But that would not be in the near future. I would have to write and direct at the same time because I don't think anyone could give me a script that I would want to direct."

"To be honest, I really think a lot of Hong Kong actors/actresses aren't interested in European movies."

"Well first of all, in Hong Kong, I think they're still interested in the action films and I think in some ways in action films we still do it better than the Americans. I think that's the first interest that people have still on Hong Kong movies and, you know, the world is smaller now and it's time to open your eyes to other things."

"I mean for me, sometimes I can just picture things that I can't explain, and I think a snake just sort of wriggles along the way."

"Well I don't think any two different people can be compared, because for me as you see on my list I've worked with so many different kinds of directors, that I never try to compare two people. I think they are individuals, and because of their upbringing and background they become the way they are and it also affects what they want to say in a movie, I think that's the interesting part, to see the differences in them."