ROMOLA GARAI

I'd always try to get a C, maybe a B. Other girls would trot off a brilliant essay and go off to Oxford; I'd think: 'Where is the justice?' I took A-levels in English, history and theatre studies and got three Bs.

I'm an actor. And like a lot of actors, it's very important that everybody loves you all the time.

If you are a 19-year-old woman, there are very specific things that directors and the people in positions of power in the industry - who tend to be older men - are going to want you to be and do. They are not going to want some chatty, difficult, slightly spoilt girl.

There's nothing very interesting about my life.

As a kid, I really loved 'Jane Eyre,' I used to fantasise that the past was so much better and my lifetime was crap.

I get quite disappointed that we're still telling stories that I think are problematic in terms of what they're saying about women.

I love '30 Rock.' Absolutely love it. It's a game-changing show.

Films about women and their concerns are seen as frivolous, limited and, most damaging of all, niche.

There are American directors I'd really like to work with, but I don't know how much I want to be sitting in my house, doing the rounds of meetings with CEOs. You have to be really hardworking to do all that, and I'm lazy.

I just don't believe you're capable of being an actor unless you have a desire to experience your emotions in a public way.

Increasingly, it's actresses doing the big fashion advertising campaigns, and now there's no distinction between actresses and models.

I can't spend the rest of my life being pretty in a bonnet.

If you are an actress in L.A., on your 40th birthday they should just hand you the keys to the lunatic asylum.

If you have the opportunity as an actor to control your career in any way, then you've won the jackpot.

The language of freedom-fighting was so co-opted by the baby boomers in order to express their now-hopelessly compromised ideologies that no other generation could emulate it without a smirk. This has created an apathetic generation in the West, with young people no longer distinguishing between the old order and the new.

I wouldn't want to direct - I think that's a very different job. You have to be a very specific type of person to do that.

I was 20 years old when, despite mass protests against military action, Iraq was invaded in 2003 - it didn't make for motivated political participation, I can tell you.

I would argue that something dark is lurking between the sexes, and that it is seeping out into cinema.

The last thing a director needs is an actress who feels an ownership towards a particular character.

I wish I was a more adventurous person in a way. But actually, security is a really big deal for me.

Acting is a strange job because your control is very limited.

I can only do something that my sister or my daughter, if I have one, could watch and feel positive about.

You don't have to conform to a very specific aesthetic today, whereas 1950s women definitely had to.

If I have to spend prolonged periods of time in a trailer, I go mad. Stuck in a metal box doing nothing, I lie there paralysed with boredom.

I have always been interested in gender politics, so I'm not that keen on doing things that don't represent a truth about women.