I'm unqualified to do anything other than music.
If I were to limit myself to the opportunities that were presented playing only Chinese-American parts, I would be virtually without a career.
We must have a university degree even if we never get a job in the area of knowledge we were forced to study.
For the first six years of my career, I was relegated to those girl-next-door, sweet, cheerleader kind of roles, and it was really frustrating for me because you don't have to do much acting.
At the Paris Opera Ballet, they were always making choices for me.
When I begin to eliminate from the list all those professions which are impossible from a financial point of view and then those which I feel disinclined to - it leaves nothing.
I want to act because I don't know how to do anything else.
I eventually thought, this is the only thing I could do as a profession, I can't really do anything else.
I didn't really want to be a teacher, but there was nothing else I could be. Most of those who went to the university became teachers. It was just the racial restriction on Africans.
I learned to act reactively very well because those were the sorts of roles I was given for 20 years. It was hard to break out of that typecasting.
I didn't get to wrestle at all in TNA. I wanted to wrestle, and they wouldn't let me.
In terms of being typecast, if you do something like Father Ted that infiltrates the public's imagination to the extent that it did, I think realistically you're not going to be asked to do something radically different from that very often. But it's not a problem.
I know an actor who would play one type of part but could never get cast as tough. Once he got cast as tough, as a cop, he only got offered cop roles. It's a funny business in that regard. It's all about perception.
I just can't imagine having to do an accent all the time - like, in your whole career.
At present I feel like a caged animal, bound up by the luxury, comfort and respectability of my position. I can't get the training that I want without neglecting my duty.
I think I'm sort of locked into the sitcom genre.
I began writing when I was still in the British Foreign Service, and it was then understood that even if you wrote about butterfly collecting, you used another name.
You can easily become boxed in and be only identified with musicals or plays.
