Felicity Kendal Quotes

So many roles for women demand that you make the audience fall in love with you or sympathise with you.

I hope to start enjoying flirting again when I'm 70, like my mother did.

Every woman feels she is too old and has missed the boat.

We take ourselves so seriously moment by moment, but India shows you a sense of eternity. You're one little ant on a hill. You're part of life, but you're not the whole thing.

As we have more women in power, so the plays and the TV dramas are reflecting what's happening.

I'm not very much of a foodie; I like small amounts of delicious things, but I've never overeaten - I'd much rather have a glass of wine.

I have to say I am a 'Strictly' fan, which is why I am in it. I've always watched it for years. I am not an 'X Factor' fan, and I just think it is a different show. One is about learning something new and having a great time, and the other is rather desperate.

I think in the acting world you either manage that transition to older roles, or you stick with what you've always done and then discover nobody can bear you doing it as an older person.

The problem men seem to have, and women, too, is that they have this very structured idea that we should find a partner and settle down and be, you know, faithful. And yet clearly this is really, really hard for anybody to do!

There is the most wonderful thing called Polaris: it's a very high frequency laser treatment that lifts and tightens the skin.

Looking back, I got the bed I wanted and I lay in it. I didn't want to go to America. If you want to join that world, you have to go and live there, and that was something I could not have done. I am very much about family. It doesn't matter where I live, but I feel very needful of my people around me. Besides, theatre is my first love.

Every time we moved on, I joined a different class in a different school with different girls until, aged 13, my father had taken the decision to pull me out of school altogether. Everything I needed, he reasoned, could be found within the rich language of Shakespeare's plays at which, by then, I was something of an old hand.

There is one sure way of telling when politicians aren't telling the truth - their lips move.

I love a mask. It's why I've got a thing about good writing. When you're acting, you're going into someone else's work. You're behind his words; it's not you.

In a play, the director is God, and I'm a great arguer. Rather boringly so, I think, about trying different things.

I wouldn't trade anything for family time. To me, it is more important than everything else, and I have a very deep-rooted belief in it, which is influenced by my Jewish faith. That's a very great source of who I am and what I believe in.

For me, compatibility is a sense of humour, being able to laugh together; that is very important.

It was in India that I started my acting career, courtesy of my parents, long before I set foot on stage in England. They headed a company of travelling players performing Shakespeare up and down the land.

When I was little I always thought I was marked out, special, on the verge of something momentous. I used to tingle with anticipation.

I'm lucky in that I don't like sweet things at all. My father loved cakes to such a degree that he kept forcing them down my throat when I was little, and it put me off for life. He had terrible cholesterol, poor thing.

I think you have to relax about aging. What else can you do?

The gym is where I get my chill-out time. I try to go six days a week, but when I'm working, that goes down to about three.

My father was my trainer, my teacher. He was closer to my sister in the sense that she adored him and he adored her. He was more like my pal. Because of the 13-year gap, I think by the time I came along, it wasn't a big deal. I wasn't spoilt or cherished, I was just put to work.

I am used to looking good. In a way, if I thought I looked like the back end of a bus, I probably wouldn't have done 'Strictly Come Dancing' and gone out there in public.

I don't think, until you've actually lost somebody you really love, that you can go through that door that allows you to be grown-up.

A lot of my close friends are nothing to do with show business. But the people I've had relationships with, invariably, I've worked with. I think that's probably because I grew up in a family where we all worked together, so it's something I feel comfortable with.

I think very few people do find a relationship where, every moment of every day, everything they do comes together. That's why, in a nutshell, everyone loved Barbara in 'The Good Life.' She was the perfect partner. It was a formula. She wasn't glamorous. She wasn't clever. But she was a good partner. That's too easy, too perfect.

I don't think I've ever not had a dark side. But one of the wonderful reasons why you go into this business is that half your life you live in a fantasy, which is somebody else's life. It's actually a great release because you're not having to deal with the itty-bitty bits of life.