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I remember really loving the CoverGirl ads when I was younger - there was something very cool about how they always put the girls in white. It looked so clean.

It took me a while to warm to the '20s costumes on 'Downton.' I love it when women accentuate their curves, and that era was all about hiding them. The shapes they wore then were in tune with female empowerment. Cutting off their hair and hiding their busts was a way of saying, 'We're equal to men!'

There is a tendency to feature more actresses on covers, but I'm a big model lover. I grew up watching these models, and they gave me the wish, the need, to work in the fashion industry. I loved watching them - their beauty, the way they worked in front of the camera and that power of transformation, especially in the Seventies.

You see, there weren't these magazines like 'Heat' in my day. Always waiting to trip up these pretty girls and make them seem something horrible, something to make them look stupid and small and ugly and disgusting.

With 'Holes' I was troubled that there weren't very many female characters. I tried to put them in where I could. But the setting didn't lend itself to girls.

Being on the cover of 'Vogue' at 15 meant nothing to me. I never really understood what it was they were looking at, what they saw in me.

The degree that these scenes went to... there was a couple of days I was upset... I'd have to hurry back to the girls in the makeup trailer and have a bit of a cry because it messes with your head.

It was a scandal when I did French 'Playboy' in 2008, though I was never actually nude in it. I think it's really funny that I'll have a cover of 'Playboy' to show my grandkids.

It was described as Sex and the Suburbs. It's so not that. Because on Sex and the City, those women told each other everything; on our show, it's much more like the real suburbs - nobody tells anybody anything. Everything's a secret.