Kenneth Cranham

If you swap it about, do television, theatre, film, you can go on surprising yourself. The problem is you get employed to do something you've already done. They want something from that sheep pen of performances they've seen you do.

I feel at home in Scotland and go back whenever I can. I've played the Edinburgh Festival twice, and I get the train across the Forth Bridge to Lochgelly, just to see it.

The only acting I knew when I was a boy came from Lochgelly. With a double bill, people would live their lives in the cinema. You would even see babies being breastfed in the audience.

You have to succeed as a young actor, then as a dad actor, those would be my 'Harvey Moon' years, then as an old actor.

I've always liked texts that you immediately understand. I suppose the playwrights who really speak to me are Edward Bond, Joe Orton and Harold Pinter. I've been in six different Pinter productions - I love the clarity of his language. He has this way of using words - there's a thrill to them.

Christopher Plummer once told me that he never orders a wine without first confirming that the restaurant has a second bottle in case he loves it.

Cinema dominated the Fife coalfield towns. We lived in Lochgelly, but my mum was caught up in Hollywood. She was in love with the style and glamour. Sometimes she would come with me to the cinema in the afternoons, and she would say things like, 'I wouldn't mind a peck with Gregory.'

I had a whole Scottish existence until we moved to London when I was four.

When you act for a living, you are lucky enough to get to say things you really want to say. You get lines that you look forward to, lines that jump out like a jack-in-the-box; you're thinking: 'Wait till you hear this.'

The thing about theatre is that when it is actually occurring, when you have the audience on your side, you absolutely think you can will them to do anything. It's exhilarating.

You create a blueprint of your best performance, and you're happiest the night you surpass that blueprint. That won't happen that often, but it will happen. It's like sculpting: you keep refining. When you have a piece that is yours, that is just you, that becomes obsessive; you think about it all the time.

I was fantastically well versed by the time I left school. I had a teacher who put 'A Clockwork Orange' my way, and 'Catcher in the Rye.'