My father died. It is still a deep regret to me this day that in choosing acting as my career I was forced to hurt him. He died too early to see I had done the right, the only thing.

For me, half the joy of achieving has been the struggle and the fight, the pitting myself against the world and all its competition - and winning.

My birth neither shook the German Empire nor caused much of an upheaval in the home. It pleased mother, caused father a certain amount of pride and my elder brother the usual fraternal jealousy of a hitherto only son.

I turned down the first script offered to me, and the second. I lay on my back one day under an umbrella, in the garden, reading the third, and wondered why I had turned down the first.

Everyone in my family is in the film business; I knew I wanted to be creative and it was important in my family to be artistic.

No doubt, much of the joy of a great romance is the moment when these stoic heroes crack open and reveal themselves to their heroines - the only women strong enough to match them.

I've never taken any issue off the table for lack of suitability. Only for lack of imagination.

In many senses, creativity and 'plagiarism' are nearly indivisible.