Anne Boleyn isn't a sympathetic character, but I like that she isn't a people pleaser. She's ambitious and manipulative, but she's honest. I'm biased, but I don't think a woman who has said 'no' to the King of England for six years would jump into bed with four of his best friends. She was a slick political mind.

There's a certain amount of pressure that comes from playing real people. It's a pressure to deliver something fair and right to the real person and any living relatives. But generally, it's a joy, as you get to target your interest on a particular era.

Broadway is the actor's Mt. Everest - but with more flattering frocks.

I knew who Jackie Kennedy was in terms of being the wife of JFK and being a clothes horse, and I knew that she later married Onassis, but I had a very, very vague idea of who he was.

I was a very creative child. I played the saxophone and piano, and I was always writing poetry and stories, or drawing in my notebook. I just tried to express myself through as many creative outlets as possible. And in high school, I started to get really into photography and videography and would spend hours working on it.

Every time you get on a stage or in front of a camera, the whole exercise is about imagination. You're constantly depicting something that doesn't exist, and trying to find the reality of it. Once you settle on that premise, everything else is a matter of degrees.

Radio listeners often have a very fertile imagination when it comes to body shape.

What I treasure most at any moment is intimacy, surprise, a sense of mystery, wit, depth and love. A handful of cherished friends offer me this, and the occasional singer or film-maker or artist. But my most reliable sources of electricity are Henry David Thoreau, Shakespeare, Melville and Emily Dickinson.