Jennifer Ehle

What's the point of doing a brilliant Hedda Gabler in my back garden if no one will ever see it?

I don't mind being an only child; never have. I am lucky, though, that I have my friend Emily, who grew-up very close to me and so, there is someone I have shared memories with. I would miss that if I didn't have it, I think.

There's never been a game plan, and I suppose I've had an uneasy relationship with my ambition. Someone who had been in my year at drama school once said to me that I was terrifyingly ambitious back then. Which was not at all what I felt at the time - I felt paralysed with shyness, though that evaporated.

I started so slowly and had so few followers and then it kind of sort of snowballed. I still feel an intimacy on Twitter, which I think a lot of us do. It feels intimate, doesn't it? I love it. I never thought I would.

After 'The Real Thing,' I thought about giving up acting because it's difficult to have a rich life outside your work when you're an actress, a private life that can survive being picked up and put down. That's what I thought, anyway.

So much of my life is not about work and that is usually mainly what I do tweet about. We live a very quiet life.

There is a cost that comes with moving schools so often and it's not what I want for my son when he gets older, but it did make me very adaptable. I became aware of what was missing from the social structure of each class that I arrived in, and made sure to fill that gap.

I distanced myself, relatively, from my parents for a year or so in my late twenties. It was necessary for me to feel my autonomy. Other than that brief gap, we have always been a very close family.

If I print something out, I just spend all my time trying to find where I've put it down.

You know what else I've learnt? That it's all right not to ride the crest of the wave. Every time a wave comes along I retreat, and I haven't come to any harm yet.

The Old Vic is a beautiful theater to work in. It's quite a large house, but it has a feeling of intimacy.

My natural accent is American. I chose to speak with a U.K. accent when I was about to enter the final year at drama school in London. I was going to try to find a way to stay in the U.K. after I finished college and could not imagine trying to live and get work there with an American accent.