Top 60 Lesley Sharp Quotes

My career was never built on being a great beauty so it’s not like I look back at being 25 and I’m shuddering because that youthfulness has gone.

I’ve got a big nose, and that’s from my birth father.

I had a fantastic father, Jack Sharp, and I will always carry him in my heart as my father.

Being on stage is like running a marathon every night.

With ‘Before We Die,’ the psychology of the characters and their relationships with one another was key.

Andrew Lincoln is an amazing actor and turned into a great friend.

Learning lines is bloody boring.

European shows are unafraid of investigating philosophical questions on behalf of their characters or elevating imagery or letting moments play out.

What actors are involved in is a similar sort of psychological forensic examination of the characters they’re playing. You try to have an idea about why somebody does what they do and you try not to be in judgmental about it. That is what psychologists and psychotherapists aim to do with their patients.

I feel pretty disillusioned about the politics and politicians in this country – and angry.

I think there are some people who have those childhoods that are really bad and so what happens is that they find an escape through pretending to be other people.

It’s very important to do things that you believe in – if you’re bored by what you do, try something else.

I think as a police officer when you’re dealing with a member of the public you put something on because you have to appear to be this person who knows what they’re talking about, and of course you’re also trying to figure out the Rubik’s cube of why people behave in the way that they do.

If you get involved with something on stage that makes you feel dreadful, that’s a nightmare because you have to repeat it every night.

Now I belong to this fantastic group called The London Writers Salon, which runs Monday to Friday with sessions in London, New York and L.A. and you can log in to them all and basically write in the company of 300 other people, with nobody chatting.

The thing that gives me most pleasure is when I feel I’ve really engaged with my colleagues, other like-minded individuals, in getting something to work, and that I’m part of something.

You have to know what you’re doing, you have to be experienced. You can’t just say, ‘I’m an actress in ‘Scott & Bailey,’ I’m going to write an episode.’

You know when actors are very shy and self-effacing? Well, I really love it when people like my work, but I’m also really embarrassed about it. It’s strange. And a bit pathetic really.

I felt desperately sad, because it’s a real shock in the 21st century, where we’re fortunate to live in amazing country like the U.K., that there are areas where young women feel so desperate about what their future should be.

With adoption, there is a whole range of experiences, and a lot of it goes under the radar. There is too much icky stuff about it – all this stuff about people reunited, a sickly sentimentality about blood lines. For me, at least, life is much more ambiguous than that.

If you start doing a television or a film job and you suddenly think it’s a mistake – the director’s horrible or the people you work with aren’t very kind, or whatever – it’s much easier to deal with because it’s in bite-sized chunks. You do it, you go home.

I do bikram yoga as often as I can – and if I can’t, I’ll go for a run.

Sometimes I feel very bullish about it – this is the age that I am, this is the way that I look, there’s nothing I can do about it and I’m grateful that I’ve lived this long.

Because I think your twenties are really difficult, aren’t they?

I love euro TV drama, there’s some fantastic shows.

The really hard thing for both men and women is getting older: it becomes increasingly difficult to live a life based on uncertainty, disempowerment is written into the job description.

I want to stay open. I don’t want to shut down the possibility of new ideas, new ways of seeing the world.

I desperately wanted to go to drama school and after that I’ve always been delighted to be offered employment – to view everything that comes my way as a chance to get better.

I met my birth mother as an adult, but she was always quite vague about my birth father. I knew he had been married to someone else, that he’d had children, but that was about it.

And whether or not you’re interested in opera or classical music or folk music or the theatre, I think that for a nation’s health and well-being it’s very important that the arts scene is supported.

I don’t like to generalize about men, but I do feel there’s still a long way to go if we want a society that is civilized, kind and tolerant, not biased, bigoted, homophobic or racist.

You’re immediately in a world of noir when you’re watching shows like ‘The Bridge’ or ‘The Killing.’

We can’t all have faces like Elizabeth Taylor or Angelina Jolie.

Everyone has a certain hand dealt to them and you just have to work out whether you can keep going. The thing is, I don’t know what I would do if I didn’t act.

I don’t have the looks of angel, I don’t have the body of a goddess, I’m kind of invisible.

I really think it would be useful if society stopped vilifying older women.

I’m an actress, not a politician. And my private life is my private life.

Just because I’m older, I’m not ready to ease off. I’m interested, I want to do stuff.

I have a lot of friends who have nothing to do with the acting profession and they really liked seeing a woman of their age being represented on TV in what they felt to be a very realistic manner.

What was fantastic about ‘Scott and Bailey’ was the opportunity to engage with female characters that were absolutely committed to their working life but also had to cope with all of the outside stress and pressure of their real lives.

I think everybody, at some point, rather feels that they have to shake themselves up somehow.

You get the best stuff when people are writing what they’re really passionate about.

We’re 50 per cent of the population so it’s appropriate we’re reflected everywhere as people who take part in society in a really proactive way – that women aren’t just reactive, they’re out there doing stuff.

I do try to think if I can afford not to do something I don’t want to do, and if I can, then I don’t do it, that’s for sure. But the consequence of that is that you can be unemployed, it can make you feel ghastly, because you wonder if you will ever work again.

If you get hung up on the history of a part then you’re on a hiding to nothing.

At times I am very self-critical and disappointed with my appearance, and there are other times I think, ‘How lucky I am to be alive.’

You might be able to mimic other styles but what’s important is that you are true to who you are. You have to find your own voice.

What I’ve done is I’ve started writing a novel, so that’s my big adventure.

The police genre is capable of holding and shaping many forms of storytelling.

My father served in the Royal Scots Fusiliers for many years.

I don’t think anyone’s interested particularly in watching stuff that’s just about two-dimensional characters anymore.

A girl at school once said to me, ‘You are an overfed, under-washed farmhand.’ I was 12.

I think what’s fabulous about ‘Living the Dream’ is that accidents happen to them and they’ve got dramas and pitfalls to get through, but they do it as a united pair.

Being northern is fantastic but the positive associations I have – about being from a hard-working, funny and friendly community – aren’t always portrayed in that way.

When I was in my 20s, I think there was a lot of really arcane male behaviour that wasn’t even questioned.

I’ve been so grateful for writing, and writers and, actually I would say that that is the cornerstone of my career, the writing. That’s the truth of the work that I’ve done in theatre and it’s definitely the case for the work that I’ve been lucky enough to do on screen.

I realized a few years ago that as an actress I’d signed myself up to a life of disempowerment. I’m always waiting for permission to do what I want to do.

I don’t know about you, but I certainly feel so battered by seeing people wearing masks. It’s all we hear, all we talk about, so that actually when you watch TV, the last thing you want to see all the time is people wearing masks.

I learned a lot from Russell T. Davies, who is the most wonderful writer.

If drama school was like doing a BA, coming to the Court was like an MA or a PhD.