I did a drama degree, went to secretarial college, then got a job with a theatre company in Birmingham. It's been a slow burn, which doesn't seem to have gone out.
I grew up seeing a lot of theatre, and it was theatre that really seduced me into acting - not film or television.
Theatre is a game of hide-and-seek. For both the hiders and the seekers, the thrill is in the discovery. When the rules of the game are too vague or too complicated, however, the audience can lose its urge to play; the prize no longer seems quite worth the hunt.
Our job is to make manifest the story, to be it. In a sense, the theatre is such a big star itself, bigger than any Shakespearean actor I could hire, that we should take the opportunity to fill it with voice and verse and movement, not interpretation.
Even if I'm in a movie theatre, I'll touch up an hour into the film because I know I could be a little shiny.
There's such a sense of theatre in getting glammed up; it's like putting on a play or short film.
I don't know, on a sitcom, and in theatre especially, you have to really be listening to an audience. And if you're losing them, you can hear the sniffs, and the playbills shuffling and whatnot.
Ultimately, theatre is about creating a sense of wonder, and I think wonder is achieved not by a kind of wide-eyed silliness but by being available to that which is most unknown, inside the material and inside yourself.
If I'm in theatre, cinema doesn't even cross my mind. Similarly when I'm making a film, theatre doesn't cross my mind.
Our grandparents' generation prefers to watch film on TV rather than going to the theatre because of the simple reason that they are really old. Watching a film for, say, two hours at a stretch is difficult for them.
Why was I so single-minded about acting? Acting wasn't in the family; no one went to the theatre in my street. It wasn't encouraged in my school.
I always kind of dreamed locally - I never really ever dream that I would be south of the border; I dreamed about being a theatre star in Toronto, and maybe I'd do Stratford and regional stuff. I always thought it would be a slow growth.
Everything happens every night for this audience, and it's a very special occasion to come to the theatre.
Though I acted in hundreds of productions, appeared at the Guthrie Theatre and on Broadway in Amadeus, I discovered in my thirties that I didn't really like stage acting. The presence of the audience, the eight shows a week and the possibility of a long run were all unnatural to me.
Religion is close to theatre; much of its power comes from the effects of staging and framing.
The best conversation with Stanley Kubrick is a silent one: you sit in a theatre and watch his films and you learn so much.
In 1993, I was working at the Steppenwolf Theatre in Chicago.
When I was 20 years old and first with the Steppenwolf Theatre Company, we had an 88-seat theater in a basement and no money.
I was one of the artistic directors of the Steppenwolf Theatre, which me and many dear buddies started all the way back in 1974, and I have a lot of that in my makeup.
I did loads of student films and fringe theatre. I worked for free a lot.
