My instinct is to surround myself with the company of wise, witty, wonderful women, and I have a great bank of female friends of all ages.

I want the kind of feminism that allows me to have a voice and to compete on equal terms with men yet still, potentially, to have one of them hurl me over their shoulder and carry me off somewhere, because I still find proper, old-fashioned masculinity deeply attractive.

I panicked in my 20s and 30s about whether I was doing the right thing. I was an excited puppy, wanting to please people and feeling guilty that I'd had a privileged education and an acting career.

Kristin Scott Thomas is terrific. She has a career in France and a career in England: how cool is that? I wouldn't mind that.

My mother taught children to love to dance.

I am a transporter of the Italian culture - culinary culture, family culture - because I love it, I thrive in it, and I think it's the right way.

You've just got to focus on you, yourself, your family, your team... and all the rest is just fluff.

Like all my family and class, I considered it a sign of weakness to show affection; to have been caught kissing my mother would have been a disgrace, and to have shown affection for my father would have been a disaster.