- I had no real ambition about acting. But I knew there had to be something better than the bloody chemist's shop.
- [on her Oscars] My mother polishes them to within an inch of their lives until the metal shows. That sums up the Academy Awards--all glitter on the outside and base metal coming through. Nice presents for a day. But they don't make you any better.
- If I'm too strong for some people, that's their problem.
- An actor can do "Hamlet" right through to "Lear", men of every age and every step of spiritual development. Where's the equivalent for women? I don't fancy hanging around to play Nurse in "Romeo and Juliet". Life's too short.
- [speaking in 1974] Ideally, one would love to work in England. But if no one in England is going to take their courage in both hands and dig into their pockets and finance films--then you're going to have to work abroad.
- I was the archetypal spotty teenager who suffered the tortures of the damned because I wasn't like those girls in the magazines. I had lank, greasy hair and I was fat and spotty.
- If anyone thinks I looked sexy stripped in The Music Lovers (1971) they must think Minnie Mouse is sexy.
- [on acting] You'd think it's something one would grow out of. But you grow into it. The more you do, the more you realize how painfully easy it is to be lousy and how very difficult to be good.
- Men can be a great deal of work for very little reward.
- You see women in America who've had facelifts--faces as smooth as melons. It makes my stomach turn to think about voluntarily putting myself under a surgeon's knife.
- One of the most depressing remarks that was made when I first came to the House of Commons was made by an MP who said, "What d'you want to come here for? You're famous already".
- [on acting] When I have to cry, I think about my love life. When I have to laugh, I think about my love life.
- If all the star system can offer its talent is the crap it does, then producers should pay through the eyes, ears, nose, mouth--any orifice you can think of.
- Why put make-up on when you only have to take it off again?
- I used to empty ashtrays for the cigarette butts, re-roll them and make myself a fag. I used to live on a pound of sausages and a cooking apple.
- I was five months pregnant when I made that nude scene in Women in Love (1969). I'd never had such a marvelous bosom.
- [upon learning of her unexpected second Oscar victory in 1974] I was working but I doubt that I would have been there even if I hadn't been. Watching it on television here in my hotel suite, I kept telling myself that I ought to turn it off and go to bed. I felt disgusted with myself--as though I were attending a public hanging . . . No one should have a chance to see so much desire, so much need for a prize, and so much pain when it was not given.
- Funny things do happen, though. "Harper's" wanted to include me in their gallery of "Most Beautiful Women". That was hilarious. It was all a terrible mistake, of course. I wound up on a separate page as "a stern young beauty bursting upon London". Stern, you see. Not that I'm really tough.
- [on Hollywood] One has to have a reason for going there. If you have a job there, it's like a passport or a visa, and you can always get out. But I should think to be stuck there all the time you'd go mad.
- [on work] I knew early on that I'd have to work, work, work if I wanted to amount to much; plums don't drop into plain girls' laps.
- [in 1970] It's ridiculous when you think how hard I'm working right now, when for so many years nobody even knew I existed. But I don't want to wake up one morning and find myself stuck in the hermetically sealed, centrally heated, showbiz world which can destroy you. I wouldn't like to think that I couldn't go to the launderette when I felt like it.
- I was never part of the glitzy, glamory, show-bizzy part of the entertainment world. I don't think I could ever have been. It wouldn't have interested me and, you know . . . I wouldn't have been any good at it.
- [on gender roles in theatrical plays] There was the male and female lead, the male and female juvenile lead, and the male and female character lead, and the male and female juvenile character lead, and if you didn't fit into any of those boxes then you didn't work.
- Acting is not about dressing up. Acting is about stripping bare. The whole essence of learning lines is to forget them so you can make them sound like you thought of them that instant.
- My money goes to my agent, then to my accountant and from him to the tax man.
- I look forward to growing old and wise and audacious.
- At a meeting you might present an idea and it will be listened to and someone will say, "Oh yes, that's fine". Ten minutes later a man down the table will produce the same idea, but possibly reworked in its presentation, and there will be unanimous acceptance of what a good idea it was. Also you will be talked over, that's the other thing, you sort of become invisible, and if you protest this, you are deemed to be some form of extreme harridan.
- One has to begin to take all the work and redirect it into a way in which the problem is actually solved, not merely managed.
- [on Margaret Thatcher] The first Prime Minister of female gender, OK. But a woman? Not on my terms.
- [about British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher] I was meticulous in not being personally rude. I didn't know the woman: I did know the policies. I spoke up because history has been rewritten over the past week. I lived through the Thatcher period. I know what it was like. I know what it was like for my constituents. The reality bore no resemblance to what's being presented.
- [on Oliver Reed, in a 1994 interview] Oliver and I have absolutely nothing to say to each other off-screen. As people, we are chalk and cheese. What I admire in Oliver is his consummate professionalism. It doesn't matter what state he may be in physically, when they say "Action!", he is ready, and that was the aspect of working with him that I liked. I've worked with him a lot and he is an infinitely better actor than he gives himself credit for.
- Acting is always hard. Why else would you bother to do it?
- I do wonder why contemporary dramatists find female characters so uninteresting, why we are never or rarely ever the driving force of anything
- All great drama is essentially trying to tell the truth about what we are. All [William Shakespeare (I)] ever asks is, "Who are we, what are we, why are we?" And I think politics at its best is trying to find out how you do create a society in which there is genuine equality which acknowledges that we are different.
- A theater is a theatre is a theatre. It's a dark space which strangers fill, and you're in the light. Hopefully, something from the light goes into the dark, and the dark increases that and sends it back, and you create this perfect circle.
- I was quite happy when I got the second Oscar. Now my mum has a proper set of bookends.
- [on Ken Russell] I enjoy working with him. He doesn't know anything about acting, and he leaves you alone.
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