David Warner

On film sets, people get put down in public a lot.

There were certain young actors I had trained with at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art who had always got the big parts and I was always the spear-carrier. Suddenly the roles were reversed and I couldn't understand why, and nor could they.

I don't think I could be happy as an actor if there was a tyrant on the set.

My early life was a bit of a mess but it was no one's fault. It was just how it was.

Americans who have travelled and who have English friends know we are not necessarily all baddies, but I think that seeing us being so incessantly nasty on screen has a drip, drip, drip effect on the rest of them.