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I am a person of the 18th century.

When I was a youngster, I was brought up in a very political background on an estate in north London.

I started in theatre. I was at Cleveland and I went to London for the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare's birth.

I was always fascinated, even as a child, by antiques and ancient times. I always felt I should have been born in the 17th or 18th century. They really had a big stone castle with authentic furniture.

But the eighteenth century, on the whole, loathed melancholy.

I went to London because, for me, it was the home of literature. I went there because of Dickens and Shakespeare.

To have a childhood surrounded by people like Sir Laurence Olivier and Vivien Leigh sounds glitzy, but for years I wanted to repress it. I couldn't take that kind of power and success.

I've had the good fortune of studying the 17th-century art of Amsterdam in preparation for a film.

I don't read a lot of books that were published after 1755. One thing about having friends in New York who belong to the literary world, however, is that I have a steady stream of books coming to the house.