I guess we're all lucky to be in this profession where you can be someone else for two or three months on a film shoot. I find it restful. Vachement agreable.

For you, it's a silent movie. For us, it's a talking movie because we had lines on set. There's a lot of noise on set and music. We spoke in English, in French, in gibberish, but it was very alive. The challenge was tap dancing.

I'm not an American actor. I'm a French actor. I'll continue in France. If I could make another silent movie in America, I'd like to!

I discovered that silent film is almost an advantage. You just have to think of the feeling for it to show. No lines pollute it. It doesn't take much - a gaze, an eyelash flutter - for the emotion to be vivid.

I love my son. He's a great soul. He's a sweet person, but events that have happened to him in his life, some of his own making - as a parent ,you really can't take full responsibility for the destruction that can happen to a child.

I was helped by the fact that my dad is a cricket fanatic and that my three brothers and two sisters all played. It's just part of our family.

My dad, he would go through these periods of self-doubt. We'd do something that was controversial or that wasn't welcomed by everybody, and he'd go, 'Well, Shirley, our parents cursed us with ethics, and we passed it on to our children.'

My family was always wondering why I ended up playing people who were mentally ill, insane, downtrodden, and a little crazy. I think what they don't understand is that most female parts are written basically as hysterical women.