Biography

She was awarded the C.B.E. (Commander of the Order of the British Empire) in the 1999 Queen's Birthday Honors List for her services to drama.

Graduated from RADA.

Became a member of the RADA Council.

She was awarded the Laurence Olivier Theatre Award in 1992 (1991 season) for Best Actress for her performance in "Death and the Maiden".

Outspoken for social causes regardless of damage to her professional career.

I'm hardly Hollywood material - they're interested in youth and perfection and I lay no claims to either. It's not a place that's particularly interested in talent.

On playing Cleopatra at RADA: I was this skinny pale inexperienced more-or-less schoolgirl, and it must have been quite tough for this director to get a Cleopatra out of me. Which is what he said in no uncertain terms in front of all my classmates. He just tore me to shreds. And I remember thinking, 'I've got two or three options. I probably can just run out the building, go off the university and be a lawyer. Or burst into tears and get drunk and take a month to recover.'

And then suddenly I filled with rage that anybody would humiliate me like that. The only way of expressing that rage was through the language. I could feel this power coming up from somewhere I didn't know existed and coming out through everything, fingertips and brain and mouth and suddenly it was working and I remember thinking, 'Great, this is it, it's like flying!' And at the end he said, 'Thank you very much, that's more like it.'

On reading Auden aloud at school: I felt, 'I want to be the person through whom these words pass out to other people.'

I wouldn't even begin to presume that the talent of an able actor is anything like the talents of a prodigious musician. But I know what it's like to be pretty obsessed. I do understand that onstage there are times when you think, 'I could not be more alive than I am at this moment. I can't do most things in life. This is what I'm for.'

It is intensely frustrating. The longer you live, the more interesting life gets, and yet many of the parts involve carrying trays and putting lamb chops down in front of the leading man.