Quotes from Phyllida Lloyd

To be invited to the Park - the greatest free Shakespeare festival in the world - is a great honor, and I don't take it lightly.

Margaret Thatcher was pro-choice. She voted to decriminalize homosexuality. Was not profoundly religious. She was very liberal on social issues.

I didn't really realize I was a woman director until I walked onto the set at Pinewood Studios when I did 'Mamma Mia!' and everybody was calling each other 'Governor' and 'Sir'... and then, looking at me, 'Well... good morning!'

You can't wait for someone to discover you; you have to just get on and do it. Have confidence that directing is a very suitable job for a woman - with our gift for collaboration, listening, and reading the nuance of things.

I think Margaret Thatcher was a superstar in this country, and I think we all felt we needed a superstar to play her, somebody of huge intelligence, passion, and power and warmth.

I worked on live studio drama, which was one weird aberration in the 1980s. I worked on the 'Battle of Waterloo,' and my job was to reload the Brown Bess muskets - the only time the audience realised it was live was when somebody leant on a button and plunged the whole studio into blackout.

In London, it's quite a rarefied activity to be on an analyst's couch.

'The Handmaid's Tale' is a horrifying and horrifyingly possible vision of the future.

I was given a mask of myself by Frances Barber when we opened 'Julius Caesar.' I looked much younger and prettier. Wearing it was certainly cheaper than Botox.

Shakespeare was writing about his time, and it was a time when women were beginning to demand a voice, demand a say in their lives for one reason or another, mainly to do with the economics of the time.

I was hellbent on going to drama school, but my mother, rightly, panicked and persuaded me to go to university on the grounds that a degree would be 'something to fall back on.' Whilst at college, I realised I wasn't good enough or robust enough to be an actress.

The power of a close-up can be extraordinary, but you have to have actors who are able to reveal themselves.

It was extraordinary to experience 'Mamma Mia!' What an injection of good spirit and heart it was.

I think courage is commensurate with your fear - if you lack imagination and you're fearless, that's not courage to me.

Art is all about giving yourself these terrifying challenges, these peaks to climb. You're at the bottom of the mountain at the start of every new project thinking, 'Am I going to make it?'

When I was asked to read a screenplay about Margaret Thatcher, I think I felt immediate apprehension.

As a woman, I think Margaret Thatcher felt she had to be ten times more prepared than the men.

Margaret Thatcher always felt like an outsider in her party.

If you're an actor, you have to look spiffing. But as the director, you don't need to look so glamorous.

I realized that I didn't think I could stand the psychological battering that actors have to withstand. I just felt I wasn't cut out for that kind of self-promotion.

I realised you could become fat and bald as a director and still remain employable.

It's the job of the artist to take something that everybody thinks they know about, they've made a decision about, they will be immovable on, and to shine a light on it.

In a way, the debate about Margaret Thatcher in Britain has just gotten fossilized in this notion that she is either this she-devil who wrecked the industrial base of the country and ruined the lives of millions, or she is the blessed Margaret who saved the nation and rescued us from our post-war decline.

To have Hollywood tell me or other women like me that we're not a market that interests them is silly. Good stories work.