- Character contributes to beauty. It fortifies a woman as her youth fades.
- I'm fascinated by a man with a twinkle in his eye.
- I'm either offered window-dressing parts in large movies or little art films no one ever sees. People think the movies I end up doing are my real choices. I do the best things I'm offered.
- After filming The Deep (1977), all they talked about was my boobs for the next four years. God, if I was going to do a picture like that, I'd have done it a lot sexier. That looked like two fried eggs on a platter.
- The picture is called Class (1983) but the ad campaign is anything but. They've put my head onto another body and given me enormous bosoms. All the guys are going to be disappointed.
- [on her childhood home] Not one newspaper that came into the house ever left it. There were masses of books everywhere and furniture enough for three homes. My brother and I were extremely upset by it - and have now turned into clean freaks.
- I grew up in a small town, so it was thrilling to come to London in the '60s. Everyone was experimenting and having fun. We would go to Soho and meet all those incredible image changers: Roman Polanski, David Bailey, The Beatles, Ursula Andress and Terence Stamp, who is still a close friend.
- I look at photos of myself and think, "God, if I had realized I was so cute, I would have been naughtier!" But you could put any woman in a wet T-shirt and men would lust after her.
- I have never had any cosmetic surgery. I've never worried about age. I don't think all the nips and tucks look good. If these women who've had work done looked sideways in the mirror, they would see that they get a stiff curtain across their face. I think they do it because they are terrified of not being loved and of other people's opinions. Things on my body are not up as much as they used to be, and that's a bore. So I just smile more, which helps. I am becoming a fuller person as I get older.
- [on boyfriend Emin Boztepe] Our age gap is not a big issue. It just depends on what you have in common and, although Emin is much younger, he's a very mature man. There are things that are different about someone who is not of the same generation as you: they don't know everything you know; they look at things differently, but things can work out just fine.
- [on Steve McQueen] It was exciting working with him. But he was a hip American and I was very English. His phrases would drive me nuts. I didn't know what a dude was or a soul chick. I did find him attractive, but a little bit scary. He'd get on his bike and take off like a wild alley cat; that was his escape from fame.
- [on Nick Nolte] Nick is a very sexy man. He is not very aware of that himself, though, he doesn't act "sexy" -- he's just Nick. That is an extremely intriguing kind of sexy.
- [on Albert Finney] Albert is a little bombastic, but he has a twinkle in the eye. He treats me like an ex-wife.
- I have an intense obsession with making films. I not only love to make films, I perhaps need to make films.
- I love being in my garden. I don't plant a lot of exotic flora, but I do spend a lot of time outside doing manual labor.
- I'd like to get my public image nearer to my reality. People have a lot of misconceptions.
- My view is quite simple. When your dog pees on the carpet, you do not give away your dog. You say, This dog is special. I have to teach him not to pee on the carpet. I feel exactly the same way about men. They need to be taught things.
- Ideally, couples need three lives; one for him, one for her, and one for them together.
- Marriage has just never interested me.
- The thing about anything in life is you have to get ready for it. Study, learn.
- To be used in a part without depth is a frustrating feeling, when you know you have something to give.
- When I am working on a movie, all I want to talk about is the movie. All I want to be with are the movie people. It's like a clan. If I'm asked to people's houses for dinner, I hate to go, because they'll talk about other things.
- You could have a fantasy, but it's got to be based on something you are able to do. I think a lot of people's unhappiness comes with their lack of reality.
- [speaking about her goddaughter Angelina Jolie in 2015] Unfortunately, I haven't really developed a close relationship with Angelina. I see her rarely. I'm a little bit shy, actually, to be truthful, and I don't want to be someone who tries to take advantage of her.
- [observation, 2008] I think the world's gone nuts. I'm not very proud of the way things are. I don't feel very proud of America, the way things are, just the complete lack of discipline. I think it makes America look really cheap, the mixture of all these young women just showing everything and behaving like wild things. I mean, we're all wild when we're young, you know, but there's some degree, it's just a matter of degree. I just feel like all these kids just have no parents, there's no one looking after them, and I think that's really, really sad, that no one is willing to be disciplinary for young people so they have something to emulate. I really feel horrified by it. I feel really sorry for these girls, too, and I wonder if they have anybody they can trust, to talk to and put an arm around them, you know, someone genuine who is not self-interested. I presume it will pass, this time, because if it goes on...it's hard to imagine. Society goes through times when things are out of control, more than less.
- If you keep your dignity deep within yourself and you know why you did something -- anything -- then you'll carry your dignity with you. If You sell yourself for the wrong reasons with the attitude, "Oh, I'll go through with this, take the money and run," it will catch up with you. Ultimately, there will be a shallowness and a taking from life rather than giving.
- The spectacular movies they're making now, that's not the industry I wanted to go into when I came into films. I wanted to make films about intimate feelings, women and women's feelings [about] men--stories about people getting through and becoming stronger, becoming weaker...ordinary life.
- [on George Cukor, her director on Rich and Famous (1981)] Sometimes I hated his guts. I just wanted him to go to hell. It was very hard to be treated rudely in public like that. I was still probably wallowing in the seriousness of being young; he was too old to want to be serious. He just wanted to have a laugh. So he'd make these cutting remarks. Whenever we'd fall into a pause, he'd yell, "Greedy pauses! There's a train coming through!" I had to go through that again with John Huston [on Under the Volcano (1984)]. The experience with working with those kinds of men was very humbling and not terribly agreeable.
- I get offered quite a lot of things, and I guess I would be very rich, but would I be interested? The best money would be to sign up for 5 years on a series. That's not my bag. I don't like the idea of being owned by anybody. My life is now between here and Europe and I'd have to stay in one place more time than I want to.
- [on Jacqueline Kennedy, whom she portrayed in The Greek Tycoon (1978) and America's Prince: The John F. Kennedy Jr. Story (2003)] I think she's attractive, but not beautiful.
- Older women continue to want sex but men don't want to sleep with them.
- Probably when you're in love you have some sort of addiction. You can't see straight. Voice is another one that pulls a woman back. When you're trying to break up with someone and you hear them on the telephone - suddenly you're back in that place.
- I think it's not until money changes hands that someone becomes a whore.
- The really interesting stuff about my life is my private life and I don't really want to talk about that. Those are the relationships that have really made me grow. It's unlikely that I will write a book but I'm asked to do it quite often.
- I try to look reasonable when I go out but I don't do a big number and I don't call people in advance to let them know I'm coming so I can be surprised when the photographer turns up. I'm able to have a pretty reasonable life.
- What I like about a period piece is that the characters are able to express themselves. They speak in whole sentences. I love language. When you've got a good bit of dialogue, it's an empowerment. It gives you a place to have subtext. Wonderful language is such a pleasure.
- [talking about Head Full of Honey (2018)] My mother got dementia in her early 50s and lived with it for 35 years, so it's something I knew a lot about. The film approaches the subject with a little humor because that can sometimes help families dealing with it. It's painful humor, but can make it more bearable.
- Fame is great up to a point but it's not great all the time. You know - when people jump over your fence to talk to you in your garden, this is not great.
- [on making five movies back-to-back in 2018] It's hard to find good work, so when you get it you should go and do it.
- I never really liked the big machine [of Hollywood]. I did quite a bit of that when I started acting, and I've gotten in and out of it, but the last time I was on the set of a big [film] I really felt like it was a machine: all these people and all these caravans and all these caterers. It runs very beautifully in America. But I love the intimacy of film, and the films I like are usually independent. That's always been my taste, the individual, one-off stuff. Unfortunately, one gets paid virtually nothing, but that's what happens.
- I always had a lot of energy. I was a real dynamo, but then I found I couldn't attack with the same vigor. And it became an obsession, this energy that wasn't there. I thought, 'My God, is this it? Is this what happens when you get older? I'm not ready for this.' Looking back, I realize it was just bad diet and not exercising. Because now that I take more care of myself, I feel great.
- I sleep flat on my face, which is the worst thing to do, and I wake up looking like a map of Europe!
- I think I could have done a lot more a lot sooner if I'd had the right parts, but I allowed a degree of anger to set in. It's very difficult for me to do nothingness. It always has been. I have an almost complete impatience with stuff that is just generic. I need things to challenge and inspire me. These days I search for films that look at behavior in a way one hasn't really seen before. I'm as interested in the traditional ways of a woman as I am in the feminist side of a woman today.
- I've survived Hollywood because I stuck to my own way of doing things. I won't compromise.
- [why she isn't a fan of Julia Roberts] I can't forgive her. She could have any man in the world, and she has to choose somebody else's.
- I don't need everyone's approval. Sometimes, if people don't like you - tough.
- My father used to call and say: "Do you still have your self-respect?" And I would say: "Yes, Daddy." What he meant was: are you still a virgin? I answered truthfully. I was a late-bloomer. At a certain point he stopped asking.
- When my parents died I felt much more free. I of course missed them totally, but I'm just saying... I took off that level of who's important to please.
- What type of woman do I admire? Straight, full-blooded women like Jeanne Moreau and Annie Girardot and Ingrid Bergman. Women who know how to act like a woman and how to act with a roan. Women's lib? It deals with some worthwhile socioeconomic problems. But I don't want my man to cook or clean. That's not the way I was brought up. When a man offers to dry the dishes, it usually means he's going to flirt with the girl who's washing them.
- It's been men that have made my mind vibrate. In a sense, I've had much more exposure to men than I have to women. I mean, women are very important to me, too. I'm very fond of my female friends, but I'm much more knowledgeable about men than I am about women, because l've just been around men much more than I've been around women. One day I realized that. I said, "God, I'm an actress, I need to know more about women," because I don't know much about them.
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