ROGER ALLAM

That's the thing with acting. There are always loads of people who are more successful, richer, more famous and seemingly able to do anything they want.

Practice, learn the lines, work hard, don't be too respectful. Sometimes we can get too hung up on the fact that the material of the play is very finely wrought language.

Corporate jollies are generally speaking the kiss of death to an audience.

When the National Theatre was built, it was a public building. If you wander round that building now, there are bits hived off for people who pay more money. That's happening across the arts.

It's true you can end up as rich as Croesus but the thing I enjoy about acting is doing lots of different kinds of things.

What is nice about doing a long-running show is finding a language that gives it some depth.

I came to theatre as a teenager by going to the National Theatre when it was at the Old Vic and sitting on padded seats in the gallery for 15 pence, which was the price of a bus fare.

As so many people seem to have done, I kind of fell in love with Willy Brandt.

Learn your lines so well that you never have to worry about them.

I remember as a student going to Covent Garden, where they took out the stall seats and you hunkered down on the floor - I heard Pavarotti in Tosca there, and the experience of being in that same room with that astonishing voice has never left me.

Be ambitious. The great actor, director and playwright Ann Jellicoe commissioned writers like Howard Barker and David Edgar, and put on magnificent, large-scale plays in Dorset that involved the whole community.

'La Cage' has got a broad appeal. It obviously appeals to the gay community, but it's also a good, fun show that appeals across a broad audience, a great big mixture.

Life will go on - until it doesn't.

Never go dead for a second on stage. Even if you are doing nothing, do it actively.

I suppose there's a particular kind of efficiency about coming from a theatre tradition. You don't make a fuss, and you're cheap.

Watching your children growing up makes you aware of time passing. You think, 'Oh, God, look at them now! He won't be like this for much longer.'

I was in 'Babes in the Wood' at the Citizens Theatre in Glasgow in the Eighties. I was the villain - the wicked Sheriff of Nottingham.

I invented this wonderful death scene for Javert of going down on my knees and then leaning back like a limbo dancer to make it look as if I was falling off a bridge. I did it eight times a week for nearly a year and I've had trouble with my knees ever since - they don't even allow me to jog these days.

I have a glass of wine. Red. Generally when I'm cooking.

I don't know who can constantly afford to go and see things. A play, which has five people in it and one set and it cost you 60 quid? And you're in a theatre that really hasn't had a great deal of money spent on it in the last 50 or 60 years? It's kind of weird.

I'm not conscious of having changed my accent.

For clothes I go to John Simons on Chiltern Street.

A lot of actors are relatively shy people, surprisingly, so acting is a way of not being shy - and being paid not to be shy.

Try not to worry about embarrassing yourself. That's a lifetime's task.

At school I was a disaster academically but being involved in drama helped me to find another pathway into things.