Kate Beckinsale

What's considered ideal in Hollywood is completely different than anywhere else in the world. I don't think you can aspire to it, nor can I. Everybody is retouched, stretched, lengthened, slimmed and trimmed. I could look at a picture of myself from the past and think, 'Why don't I look like that now?' It's because I never have!

Given that I can't sing like Freddie Mercury, obviously I'm not going to pursue it as a career. What would be the point?

I don't have a big career plan. I just like to see how things come out, and I just try to keep going in different directions.

Job-wise, I did have a moment of panic that I should have been a doctor a few years ago, but I hate when people vomit.

When I first started working, I was very aware of the fact that I'd been to university and studied Russian and French and not acting. So when I started working, I'd started working quite young, I felt like it was important to treat myself kind of like an apprentice and do as many different types of things as I could.

If someone had told me years ago that sharing a sense of humour was so vital to partnerships, I could have avoided a lot of sex!

I have more pet peeves than anybody: people talking in the movie theater, people eating in the movie theater loudly, people being rude, people making noise when you're supposed to be asleep, like drilling noises outside. I could be here all day.

I can't tell you how many times I've gone to present at the Golden Globes, come home, whipped the dress off and read to my daughter wearing gazillion-dollar earrings. That's how it goes in my house, and I wouldn't have it any other way.

I'm glad I've never been so successful that I couldn't stop doing one thing. I've kind of been able to just kick it along and switch around.

With every project you do, you bring out a part of yourself, and it seems to be quite a good way of expanding a person.

No one is more enslaved than a slave who doesn't think they're enslaved.

Everybody likes the underdog, because everybody feels like the underdog. No matter how successful you are, you always think, 'No one's being nice enough to me!'