- I feel I know Jenny [Agutter] as a best friend. That's what happens when you spend a long time naked together!
- I didn't really capitalise on that early success because I had high artistic ideals and they didn't involve commercial cinema. That said, becoming an international film star takes its toll - there's a price to be paid for being recognised all the time, so I'm quite happy not to be.
- When you've had an Academy Award nomination for the film Equus (1977), the work comes rolling in. So I had my chance to be a film star, but I resisted fame. I had peculiar high artistic ideals in those days. There is some regret about turning down Hollywood style-fame now, but only really financially.
- I stayed with the National company to do Spring Awakening and Romeo and Juliet but then I got the chance to play Equus on Broadway and took it. And somehow the National have never quite forgiven that. It's like leaving school early all over again. Somehow you no longer belong, and when you try to rejoin they make it very difficult.
- We get scripts, but they change on a daily basis - they evolve as we go along. (On MI-5 (2002))
- I'm a bear of very little brain.
- Look, these are feelings that matter to me. I don't want the public in on it. All that matters, really, is that his play has done wonders for me as an actor and as a person. It's brought things to the surface which were hidden from me. 'Equus' opened my eyes. I was conditioned to realize that if there was something wrong with you you went to see a psychiatrist, and he sorted you out. Well, it's not that simple.
- I didn't like it. School wasn't a good place for me, and I wasn't doing well. If you don't do well you get pushed down. You stay in lower grades. It's demeaning. I always had fantasies about being an actor. Dressing up - that sort of thing. So, I joined a kid's drama club, and enjoyed it. After a while, I got small TV parts. But it was pure chance. I had no qualifications. I began to act because I really couldn't do anything else.
- [on the nude scene in "Equus"] It doesn't bother me at all, I mean, if there's good reason to have one's clothes off in a play, and if the action legitimately calls for it, you don't question it. My parents came to see the play in London, and they didn't question it. They thought it was all right.
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