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The working class of England today have no vision of society beyond the acquisitive - no version of themselves or their habits as anything other than transitional, on their way up or on their way out. The working class, at best, is a waiting room for people who aim to become middle class if possible.

The working classes in England were always sentimental, and the Irish and Scots and Welsh. The upper-class English are the stiff-upper-lipped ones. And the middle class. They're the ones who are crippled emotionally because they can't move up, and they're desperate not to move down.

Everything is about class in England, whether it's upper, lower or middle. Why should that be?

Indeed, the existence of class, of social hierarchy, is as old as man himself. It prevails in the jungle where strength determines hierarchy; among men, it has also been savagely the same, whereby rulers vested with power through personal combat, or through lineal heritage as in the case of royalty, ravage their subjects.

Class still matters in Britain today.

Look, there is a sort of old view about class which is a very simplistic view that we have got the working class, the middle class and the upper class, I think it is more complicated than that.

It's quite an interesting time, the '20s, because the politics of England were changing quite a lot, and the class structure was starting to shift a little.

The hierarchy of class in London was rigid. It was like a religion. It still is to a certain extent.

Experience has everywhere shown us, and especially in the Philippines, that the classes which are better off have always been addicted to peace and order because they live comparatively better and may be the losers in civil disturbances.

The American cinema in general always made stories about working-class people; the British rarely did. Any person with my working-class background would be a villain or a comic cipher, usually badly played, and with a rotten accent. There weren't a lot of guys in England for me to look up to.