I'm a character actor - always have been, always will be - and historically, character actors don't come into their own until later in their professional and chronological lives.

I'm a mother myself, and sometimes mothers get a bad rap just because they've tried to do their job. Some people have more of a knack for it than others do, but almost all of it falls to, 'My mother's suffocating me.' Whatever.

They say getting a show on the air and having it be a success, literally, the odds are like winning the lottery. For me, I've won the lottery several times, so I've been awfully lucky.

I have taught some master classes and things at my alma mater and sometimes at my kids' school. I will go in and talk to the theater students. I wouldn't really call myself a teacher.

I was like, 'I'm going to win Wimbledon!' I was crazy competitive, leg-slapping, all of that. But when I was 12, I saw 'What's Eating Gilbert Grape,' and it just opened my eyes to what movies can do and how they change us, and I was like, 'This is what I want to do. This is what I have to do.'

Well, one of them is annual assessment in grades 3-8. It's integral to the implementation of everything.

You cannot share your life with a dog, as I had done in Bournemouth, or a cat, and not know perfectly well that animals have personalities and minds and feelings.

Mind you, the limelight exists anywhere in the world. When you're not in the U.K., it can be as active somewhere else in the world, and for me, that's more or less been the case, so I never dropped out of the limelight in that sense.