I've been onstage once for one performance with four days' rehearsal.

I want more children but for the next three years I want to act.

Well ironically my last three roles have all been a mother. One was a Canadian film where the baby was taken away because she is a drug addict, in Irish Jam I play a mother to a four year old. I think in the future I'll be able to handle the role with a lot more depth.

I've never been onstage in my life.

For me personally, everything is on a kiss.

You can see when an actor gets bored: Their eyes go dead. I promised myself I'd never let that happen. If it does, I'll go and live on a desert island for a year.

I've always chosen incredibly different roles and things that are quite offbeat. That way you're not limited.

Now learning a bit more about footballers I think what they need to do well, is someone who really wants to stay in the background and just be a strong support.

The doctors say it dates back to a film where I had these huge prosthetic breasts because my character was breast-feeding. The weight of them, and of the baby, did my back in.

I look at being an actress as being like a mummy: You're bandaged up and preserved as soon as you start making other people money.

And the most important thing - apart from telling a good, believable story, and being a true character - is to be someone the audience will care about, even if you're playing a murderer or rapist.

We will spend more time in America, we're going to get a place in LA as hotels aren't great for the baby.

I play a character every day of my life, and I don't want to play a character as myself. They can judge me as an actress, not as a person. I'm not a spokeswoman for Anna.

It's really important to draw the line on what we do as actors.

Onstage, there's no hiding; you either can or can't act. There's no second take.

Well it's hard to bracket it like that because everyone always thinks you either go to America and you come back, fail or succeed, but it doesn't work like that.

Being a mother gives you an incredible feeling of empowerment, you think if I can go through such pain and that level of sleep and still operate and not be grumpy you can do anything. It can be quite scary, you can't function your brain, forget your vocabulary.

I have the most lovely, healthy bouncing baby, she was all very compact and the right size.

People became more interested in my love life than in me, and that has a certain effect. You start to feel very empty and worth nothing, you start to become a piece in a board game you never wanted to play.

As long as she is talented enough and passionate about doing it herself then I will be happy and support her. I think I will be sensible - my parents said I could only do it if I got my education and so I had something to fall back on.

I've been onstage once for one performance with four days' rehearsal.

David is 13 years my senior and has much more experience.

For Closer, we've had five weeks. You go into every single word because it's very, very concentrated dialogue.

If you give it good concentration, good energy, good heart and good performance, the song will play you.

Firms would be given initial entitlements to gross markup on the basis of past performance. These entitlements would be transferable and a market in them would be developed.

Humans are imperfect. That's one of the reasons that classical and jazz are in trouble. We're on the quest for the perfect performance and every note has to be right. Man, every note is not right in life.

And at the same time, you are of course a performer, but it's very important that you understand that your role as a performer is to get the best performance from those wonderful colleagues that you have the chance to work with.

To boast of a performance which I cannot beat is merely stupid vanity. And if I can beat it that means there is nothing special about it. What has passed is already finished with. What I find more interesting is what is still to come.

The next day I was in my school's production of All My Sons. This was the performance where I realized something was happening between me and the audience that I hadn't recognized before.

From protecting our natural resources to providing maritime security and national defense, the Coast Guard's duties are broad in scope, and the performance of those duties has never been more important.

To vote is like the payment of a debt, a duty never to be neglected, if its performance is possible.

I think my expectations for myself are much more severe and much more direct. You can't work on a film for six years without being your own toughest critic. So you can't really be distracted by the expectations based on your previous performance.

Unless an entire row of people got up in the middle of a performance and left the theater in disgust, I felt as though I hadn't done my job.

I'd also like to do a play. I've never done theater, and constantly changing and refining a performance is something I'd like to do, even though it may sound like work to some people - and it probably is work.

What comprises good performance? The ability through singing or playing to make the ear conscious of the true content and affect of a composition.

I always want to do things that are different. I don't want to be doing the same thing, the same performance constantly, and it feels like most people tell you that they are the same. However different you feel might approach them.

I've done scenes in films that I felt like the performance was better in certain takes, but they couldn't use them because it didn't match what the person was doing when they came around and the camera was on them.

I am always more interested in performance and character depiction, and my direction says as much.

Did you know I staged the first performance in America of At the Hawk's Well?

An arts education helps build academic skills and increase academic performance, while also providing alternative opportunities to reward the skills of children who learn differently.

What kind of morons do you have working at newspapers in Austin that would base an entire review of an artist's performance on whether or not they had a good seat?

What does my performance have to do with Russell Crowe's? Nothing. If I play Gladiator and we all play Gladiator with Ridley Scott in the same amount of time, maybe we have a chance to see who did it best.

A performance is only as good as the audience you are playing to. A lot of times you feed off of the audience, and we always try to give them all we've got and sometimes you don't get a lot back, but we've never been dead whenever we've performed.

Performance is your reality. Forget everything else.

The eating of burning brimstone is an entirely fake performance.

Offspring, the due performance on religious rites, faithful service, highest conjugal happiness and heavenly bliss for the ancestors and oneself, depend on one's wife alone.

Performance art can involve the audience with taste, smell and sounds not available with electronic media and not practical with conventional theater. This is due to the usually small audience.

Confidence... thrives on honesty, on honor, on the sacredness of obligations, on faithful protection and on unselfish performance. Without them it cannot live.

The value of old age depends upon the person who reaches it. To some men of early performance it is useless. To others, who are late to develop, it just enables them to finish the job.