Quotes from Tamsin Greig

I was a cleaner while at university. The job wasn't bad, but I was amazed by how badly cleaners are treated - how disrespected they are by the people they work for.

I did a drama degree, went to secretarial college, then got a job with a theatre company in Birmingham. It's been a slow burn, which doesn't seem to have gone out.

I tried to get into the National Youth Theatre and didn't, and I tried to get into drama school and didn't, and then I went to university and was really delighted that I went there. I think having the word 'no' can be quite creative.

I think if you're trying to be funny, sometimes you're bending a piece of metal in a direction it doesn't want to go. And sometimes comedy just needs to find itself.

I think going from doing TV and straight plays to Shakespeare is weird enough because you have this heightened language, and you are telling a story through metric poetry. But I think music is that place beyond poetry.

I think that if you take somebody out of their comfort zone, they're going to dislike people because they're not liking themselves in a situation.

Families are families. We've all got them, more or less, and we all know what it's like to be bullied by another generation.

Scientifically speaking, if I say something, or it gets misquoted, or people put a spin on it... I mean, are you interested, really, in what people are saying?

I cannot step into any day without help. I have a fantastically engaged husband who is very present for his children and our family life. We've got a brilliant nanny, other help from parents-in-law, godparents, friends. Also, I've had incredible women around me in the business.

I am interested in shows that are not out-and-out gag fests: you see the truth of a broken heart behind them. That is what life is like: it's really funny, you see funny things as soon as you step out of the room, but underneath that is a whole bag of broken hearts. It's that real pain and that real hilarity that makes life so intriguing.

When I was 17, a neighbour I knew well died of cancer, and I became au pair to her three little girls. In circumstances like that, when you can't really help, I think it's a human response to do something beyond oneself. So I did a sponsored parachute jump for Cancer Research. It was exciting and ridiculous.

Carelessness makes me cross. And unkindness.

I think comedy stems from being honest, often painfully so. I hope I can achieve that perspective in my own life and also have fun.

When I was growing up, I was obsessed with 'Cagney and Lacey.'

Maybe this whole obsession about colouring our hair is about our inability to grow up. To let go of the fact we aren't children any more, and the whole thing about changing our faces and looking young, and 60 being the new 40, is maybe we don't want to let go of our childhood.

Dad was a retired chemist who, in his 60s, fathered and fed me and my two sisters while Mum worked as a secretary. He made us curries, Chinese meals and strange concoctions. He was often unsuccessful.

I know women at work who don't talk about having a baby because they don't want to upset the apple cart, but unless people know what the problems are, why should they engage with it?

If you stop being scared, that's when entropy sets in, and you may as well go home.

I think I'm a bit odd.

I think comedy is the perfect vehicle for that which is slightly beyond life.

When we were growing up, women in their late 40s generally didn't dye their hair.

I'm quite an odd little part of the Venn diagram. I'm not a movie star and beautiful in that way. I do an odd thing that's funny and sad, and my face and my old body can take that.