Top 50 Romola Garai Quotes

As a kid, I really loved ‘Jane Eyre,’ I used to fantasise that the past was so much better and my lifetime was crap.

I’m an actor. And like a lot of actors, it’s very important that everybody loves you all the time.

You don’t have to conform to a very specific aesthetic today, whereas 1950s women definitely had to.

Increasingly, it’s actresses doing the big fashion advertising campaigns, and now there’s no distinction between actresses and models.

I want people to think I’m sexy, but to know also that I’ve got an ordinary body and not feel intimidated.

I have always been interested in gender politics, so I’m not that keen on doing things that don’t represent a truth about women.

I’ve worked with actors who tell everyone what to do in the scene – that makes me go pretty atomic.

I’ve always scribbled, and I still do it. I’ve written numerous scripts for films for which I think I’d be perfect as the complex, intelligent and, yes, modern heroine. Embarrassingly bad, all of them. I’ve had to come to terms with the fact that I’m not a writer.

I love my home, spend as much time in London as I can, and try wherever possible to avoid travelling for work. Sometimes I think I’m really badly equipped to be an actress.

The last thing a director needs is an actress who feels an ownership towards a particular character.

I get quite disappointed that we’re still telling stories that I think are problematic in terms of what they’re saying about women.

I read the paper pretty much every day, as well as getting news from the Internet and on TV. But I don’t do social media at all; I’m a Luddite from that point of view.

There’s nothing very interesting about my life.

When you talk to women who were working as print journalists or in broadcasting in the ’50s, and then you talk to women who were working in the late ’60s, there’s an enormous difference. There had already been a huge transition. Then, of course, you get well into the ’70s and there were women with children working.

We live in a society where children are expected to become adults overnight.

If you are an actress in L.A., on your 40th birthday they should just hand you the keys to the lunatic asylum.

I wish I was a more adventurous person in a way. But actually, security is a really big deal for me.

I was mad until I was about 25. Completely out of control with my emotions. Everything that happened to me was a tragedy. I’ve been much happier over 25.

When I was a child, I always wanted to be funny and to please people in my family. As you grow up that instinct becomes more refined, but it’s still there.

The worst thing you can do as a performer is to judge your character in any way, positively or negatively.

I was brought up with a very strong sense of what can happen if your society starts to chip away at the small victories women have won for themselves.

Someone like David Tennant is able to embrace people’s love for ‘Doctor Who’ in a totally positive way. I have huge admiration for people who are able to do that.

Normally, when you’re working on something, there are other characters that you have alliances with, and you have unified goals with some characters.

Writer/directors are, for me, the most inspiring people to work for because they are the person on set that knows the answer to all the questions. They have the most invested in the project because they’ve been with it from conception.

Postwar Europe was morally stagnant, and there was a lot of neo-conservatism.

Nowadays, most women just assume they have a right to be in the workplace, and any kind of discrimination they suffer is sort of more creeping.

I’m fundamentally a busy person; I spend my time doing useful things and profoundly useless things!

There are people who you see on screen and think, ‘Wow, that’s a slim person,’ and in the flesh they look nearly dead.

If you are a 19-year-old woman, there are very specific things that directors and the people in positions of power in the industry – who tend to be older men – are going to want you to be and do. They are not going to want some chatty, difficult, slightly spoilt girl.

Films about women and their concerns are seen as frivolous, limited and, most damaging of all, niche.

The point of being a movie star is that people cast you in a role. Actors tie themselves in knots trying to get out of that.

I love science fiction. I read a lot of science fiction.

I think one of the reasons I’ve done so much period work is because I feel so depressed by how society chooses to represent women in contemporary work.

I would argue that something dark is lurking between the sexes, and that it is seeping out into cinema.

The advent of digitally enhancing images – and the fact that actresses weren’t protesting against that – created an environment where big corporations felt like they had total ownership over the bodies of actresses.

My alter egos have changed a lot over the years. When I was a child, I was a black horse called Storm. Whinnying and jumping over bamboo poles in the garden took up pretty much my entire childhood.

There’s no way I could ring up a company that was lending me a red-carpet dress and say, ‘Do you have it in a 10?’ Because all the press samples are an 8 – I would say a ‘small 8.’

There was quite a lot of lying around in fields at Stonar, a small independent girls’ school in the country near Bath. It was a non-selective school and the right environment for me: academically not particularly pushy.

I think with the best actors, emotion is something that has no kind of check in them.

A passion for any novel, and any character, can crystallise your ideas when you really need to be as open as possible as a performer.

I cheated at the Model United Nations when I was 13 and had to get up and apologise in front of the whole conference.

In a way, I’d rather go into an interview and be disliked, and have unpleasant things written about me, than to have a wonderful, glowing article written that is in no way a reflection of who I am.

I realise there’s an innate paradox in promoting oneself on the one hand and saying, ‘Oh, I don’t want to be famous,’ on the other.

I’d always try to get a C, maybe a B. Other girls would trot off a brilliant essay and go off to Oxford; I’d think: ‘Where is the justice?’ I took A-levels in English, history and theatre studies and got three Bs.

Acting is a strange job because your control is very limited.

I was 20 years old when, despite mass protests against military action, Iraq was invaded in 2003 – it didn’t make for motivated political participation, I can tell you.

I can only do something that my sister or my daughter, if I have one, could watch and feel positive about.

I love ’30 Rock.’ Absolutely love it. It’s a game-changing show.

I just don’t believe you’re capable of being an actor unless you have a desire to experience your emotions in a public way.

I get nonplussed by all the Fifties retro-revival aesthetic. Would we really want to be in our pinnies in our kitchen weeping? I find the kitchen, housewifey aesthetic repugnant.