I was a nursery school teacher, and I worked with youth groups. I loved that job. It was exhausting, but you got a lot back - all their purity and insight and innocence is so on the surface, and they're so unrepressed; they'd really scream at you and then give you a massive kiss.

When I was young, I wanted to be a writer or painter. I was always writing stories, and I excelled at drawing. My teachers encouraged my art work. When I was 9 or 10, I began learning piano and started writing music.

When I was writing my dissertation, I wrote about Freud and the process of sublimation, which is when you learn to stop breast-feeding, or stop going to the toilet whenever you want to. It's about learning to repress a desire for instant gratification.

In the music industry, intelligence in women is undervalued.

We have partnered with hospitals. We do check-ups. We talk to the parents - we educate them - and at the same time, we take the kids to other countries for operations. The goal of the foundation is to build our own cardiac hospitals in Africa, starting in Nigeria.

I normally fly under the radar, and I'm normally not the best in my family, even though I'm sort of second or third best in the world.

Being a Barrymore didn't help me, other than giving me a great sense of pride and a strange spiritual sense that I felt OK about having the passion to act. It made sense because my whole family had done it and it helped rationalise it for me.

Cancer has shown me what family is. It showed me a love that I never knew really existed.