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What is extraordinary about the character of Edna - and I speak as though I am completely outside this character and I am talking to you - I'm, as it were, in the wings, and she's on stage, and every now and then she says something extremely funny, and I stand there and think: 'I wish I'd thought of that.'

I had long been resistant to doing a documentary about my mother for personal reasons. And I thought there was no way she'd want to, but then I asked her and she said 'yes.'

In Edna, I created a satiric portrait of my hometown of Melbourne, a large provincial English city paradoxically in far Southeast Asia. She's a theatrical figure, related to vaudeville in some respects. She inhabits a world in which there are comparatively few female exponents of comedy.

Dame Edna is that rarest sighting in our time of the absolute comic, an inspired personification of caprice whose comedy answered the primal call to take the audience for a tumble.

I find it very difficult to be two different characters at the same time - actress and mother.

My mother, Evelyn, was an actress and singer, and my father, Jack, was an actor. My earliest recollection of my father is being taken to see him in a matinee.

My mother was against me being an actress - until I introduced her to Frank Sinatra.

Once upon a time there was a widow who had two daughters. The elder was so much like her, both in looks and character, that whoever saw the daughter saw the mother.

I've played a lot of mothers in my movies.

My father's very public life as Famous Amos was the opposite of that of his ex-wife, my mother Shirley, who was fighting a very private, solitary battle with mental illness.