Gemma Jones

Even if your parents don't have Alzheimer's or aren't in a wheelchair, your parents get old - if you're lucky to have parents who live for a long time. It's a challenge, and it's difficult and lovely and touching and awful and ghastly and real.

Young women are still looking for a prince on a white charger to come over the hill or for Mr. Rochester to appear. We all pretend we're right-on feminists, but underneath that, there's still the bedrock of romance.

I like people who don't accept boundaries. Like Florence Nightingale. And Napoleon or Louis XIV, though I'm not sure how much I'd have liked to meet them. I admire people who aren't circumscribed by circumstance.