Quotes

Upon receiving her C.B.E. in 2000, "I still have a very heavy schedule. I haven't been off the stage for the last seven years - and at weekends, I appear in cabaret."

[on playing Madame Armfeldt in "A Little Night Music in St. Louis, Missouri, USA, in 2010, some 15 years after first playing the role in London]: Fifteen years later the idea of mortality isn't as academic. The part is short, but quite tricky technically. There's never time to build. You have to come on and hit the right note in each scene precisely. And you have to figure out who she is. She has grand style, and also such spite and venom. She's so successful, so glittering and hard, but then at the end she wonders if she played everything wrong. I don't think I got all that the first time.

[about her damehood] I idolised all the dames like Peggy Ashcroft and Edith Evans and couldn't quite believe then that we inhabited the same planet. I feel the same way now - though I also feel deeply honoured and very grateful.

[on her mid-career slowdown and Peter O'Toole] I think there was only one person who could have thrown me off course, and I happened to marry him. It was partly his mind. It wasn't the charm. I find charm fairly resistible. I never noticed that he was particularly good-looking even. He looked like an Irish gypsy. It was what he needed and what I needed.