Quotes

People have always told me I was beautiful, but beauty isn't the same as attractiveness and I don't think I have ever been attractive . . . My sister Serena is beautiful and attractive, but not me.

The parts I've been most successful in are the ones I've desperately, desperately wanted. One of them being Four Weddings and a Funeral (1994). I couldn't think of anyone better for that part than me. And the other was The English Patient (1996). Occasionally, you read scripts and, well, there you are on the page.

I'm 47 - unlike most actresses, I don't lie about my age - but I'm liking this bit. I love it. I wouldn't swap it for a million years.

I'm not complaining. I love the teamwork of making films, and you get to go to the most beautiful places. It's a very privileged life in that respect. And you live about eight different lives when you're making a film - 12 hours a day for 6, 8, 10 weeks just pretending to be someone else. I find that very stimulating. And then every now and then I go to a film that just blows you away, and that encourages me to want to make another.

I've always really wanted to be onstage but movies kind of carry you along. You get swept away by them. And there's this feeling sometimes of being a bit of a pawn and of other people channeling their ambition through you. They make films, they make films, they make films. But theater - good theater - is rarer. If you see a really amazing production - there aren't many, but if you see one - it stays with you forever and ever. Films are just consumables. The experience of living theater is more powerful.

[At the École Nationale Supérieur des Arts et Techniques du Théâtre, Marcel Bozonnet] was a proper teacher. He was just a grown-up, very smart devourer of all things cultural, and I said to myself: 'Yes, yes, I want to be like him! I don't want to do kitchen-sink dramas, I don't want to be on telly, I want to do what he does.'

When I speak English, I've been told, I have this patrician way of speaking that's very irritating. It's the whole class thing. But the French they have no inkling. Another thing is that your first success tends to mark you. In England the first time I was ever on screen I was playing an Evelyn Waugh character in A Handful of Dust (1988), and people loved it. But that sort of thing just grows, and people want to see you reproduce your own work. In France, thank goodness, they don't really get that.

People will now go to films with subtitles, you know. They're not afraid of them. It's one of the upsides of text-messaging and e-mail. Maybe the only good thing to come of it.

[on ageism in Hollywood]: I am just so angry about it and bored with it too. I am so pleased to be working here in France where women of my age are still regarded as having something to say and filmmakers find us emotionally intriguing. Just because you have a few wrinkles does not mean you do not have anything meaningful to contribute. As you get older, it all becomes richer and the implications of everything you do become so much more complicated - and therefore more interesting. Your life as a woman does not end because you are 35 or 45. (2010)

[on shooting Confessions of a Shopaholic (2009)]: I thought it would be quite good fun. But I spent my entire time waiting. I hated it, hated it, hated it, and I said that I wouldn't do another one. Funnily enough, I haven't been asked to.

On The English Patient (1996): It was so emotional that it did not end up being much fun. It was an extraordinary experience because I was working with Anthony Minghella and Ralph Fiennes, and I was aware of that, but it was very intense and painful. To be comfortable with exploring things that were difficult and coming away intact. That has all begun to happen since I started working in France, and that has made me braver. I have started to loosen up to things.

[on which film she's most proud of (Gloucester Citizen - March 22, 2015)] There are so many things I'm proud of for different reasons. There's a Romanian film (Un été inoubliable (1994)) I did entirely in Romanian. I'm incredibly proud of that but no one's seen it. I did a film with Nicolas Winding Refn (Only God Forgives (2013)), where I went a bit mad and I'm proud of that. I'm proud of The English Patient (1996) (the film that earned her an Academy Award nomination). So I'm mostly proud of things.