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When I first started acting, I started in opera and had a great desire to play grand, tragic characters. I got sidetracked in musical theater and ended up doing a lot of comedy.

I quit acting when I was 11 because I was cast as a bouncing ball in 'Alice in Wonderland,' and I felt slighted and wounded.

I played comedies and dramas.

I was once so terrified of acting that I used to pretend I was ill to get out of drama.

Theater people say you are either a comedian or a tragedian, and I'm a tragedian. And the vexing, dark characters, the ones where I don't understand their pain or their anguish, they are the characters that appeal to me.

When I left drama school, my fear was that I'd get pigeon holed into comic acting and I did so much to counter it that I got stuck in the opposite.

So the only things I was being allowed to audition for were small roles in comedies. It broke my heart. No one would see me for anything else. I knew, in order to open up my career, I had to leave or that's all I would ever be given.

I started as an actor in the theater playing a lot of character parts, and suddenly, I found myself in this place where it felt like I was getting locked into a kind of a stereotype, and it did bother me.

I wasn't straining at the bit to become a movie star any more than I had plotted to get out of vaudeville and into Broadway musicals.

I loved playing a dramatic role. There's a side of me a lot of people don't know, and when I do dramatic roles, it just all comes out.