There are so many people who want to be the next person on 'Home and Away,' or they just want to be on the cover of a magazine, and they don't really understand the craft. They're not interested in theatre, they're not interested in the art.
As I had collaborated with visual artists before whether on installations, on performance pieces, in the context of theatre works and as I had taught for a time in art colleges the idea of writing music in response to painting was not alien.
I was born in a world of opera, theatre, films, poetry, art, and therefore, out of the wire, I made a stage. That's why they call me a high wire artist.
The Arts are the only acceptable theatre of war for peace.
Q: Best part about being a musical theatre book writer? A: Explaining what that is.
Theatre is where my heart is. It's where I can do my best work. And even if I do films and TV, that's what I want to come back to.
I went to Paris for a year in 1986 to study theatre; there was a lot of clowning around, buffoonery and fencing. It was then that my own style kind of blossomed.
I did ballet and gymnastics, and then I started acting when I was eight - just doing amateur theater at a place called Oldham Theatre Workshop in my hometown.
I remember going to the theatre when I was little and the lights going down and just getting really scared about what was going to happen up there.
You can't go around the theatres handing out cards saying, 'It isn't my fault'. You go onto the next one.
My plan is to have a theatre in some small town or something and I'll be manager. Ill be the crazy old movie guy.
I'm grateful to be working. The most exciting thing for me is that I never get bored - I've done comedy, drama, musical theatre and now Shakespeare.
I remember clearly watching a 'Sooty Show' at a theatre and telling my mum I wanted to be up with the puppets, not in the audience.
It was a different planet in 1967, the Broadway theatre. It had a little ashtray clamped to the back of every seat and the author got 10% of the gross.
The thing about theatre is that when it is actually occurring, when you have the audience on your side, you absolutely think you can will them to do anything. It's exhilarating.
I have a dialect myself; it's more pronounced, because I have studied theatre and been in England. It's half-British, half-Indian.
The British theatre and establishment is so hard to penetrate, and there are so many talented people involved in it. So, to be counted among some of those actresses... It doesn't get better than that.
If there's one thing that I've done on purpose it's to take whatever job, so long as it's interesting and challenging, whether it's theatre, radio, TV or film.
My interest in theatre and storytelling began in my mother's kitchen. It was a meeting place for my mother's large circle of friends.
A lot of my training is in classical theatre; I've done a lot of classical plays in New York and also at the Guthrie and here and there across the country.
My parents lived, breathed, ate and slept theatre. Emotions were right on the surface. Growing up, the unreal had as much importance as the real.
