Top 66 Sheila Hancock Quotes

I cry all the time.

I think in some reality shows people are chosen because they are laughably bad, so that the nation and the panel and everybody else can laugh at them.

My chin‘s too big. And my nose – my nose is funny.

I’m just driven. It’s kind of a disease. I’m not proud of it, but it comes from my parents. You work and you earn your money and only spend the money that you’ve earned.

I much prefer grandmotherhood to motherhood.

I’m always guilt-ridden if I give a bad performance. If you’re doing a theatrical run, your day has to be geared to that show. You can’t mess about, particularly when you get to my age.

I only wrote one diary to be read by others. I went on an exchange to France, working as an au pair, when I was 14 and in a battered red notebook I wrote my experiences for my father to read later.

With cancer affecting one in three people, all of us will, at some point in our lives, experience it – either personally or through a loved one.

I have gained no wisdom at all in my old age, but that’s the only message I have. It’s down to you, ultimately. It really is.

I’ve been married to two mad, bad, dangerous-to-know men and it was good.

Nobody has a completely happy life, unless you’re completely imbecilic. Life is mostly pretty awful.

I’m wildly left wing, but I’m also a terrible chauvinist.

I’ve always used diaries to pour out my feelings at the end of each day, as a sort of therapy.

I sometimes buy the Daily Mail and hide it in my Guardian.

It’s wonderful to be with people of a younger generation. it really is.

I can’t think of anybody among the greats who isn’t constantly looking at themselves and feeling dissatisfied. You’re greedy in this business: always wanting to prove you can do more. I don’t ever remember a time when I’ve said, My God, I’ve cracked it – this is lovely.

I’ve been lucky enough to love dearly the people I cared for, but even then there were times when I thought, ‘I can’t bear any more.’

My first husband Alec was a very good-looking man, but by the time he came out of the war, his sort of acting was no longer in demand – although he was a working-class boy, he was actually very good at suave handsome-men parts. I began to get successful when he was out of fashion; it was agony to watch him.

I talk too much and I don’t listen or pause to think.

I would love to enjoy leisure, but I find it very difficult to sit down and do nothing.

In my early music-loving days, I thought Beethoven was a bit bombastic, a bit heroic, a bit, well, big.

I think when you’re coping with grimness perhaps you do get sillier and more escapist in what you want to see at the theatre.

When I started in the business there were no women in executive positions, no women producers or directors and certainly no camerawomen and we were destined to do very archetypal roles, very cliched things, so I was a dizzy blonde for years.

What I would love to do is more telly comedy. I did a tiny bit in ‘Toast of London‘ and was in one episode of Catherine Tate’s ‘Nan.’ I was crying with laughter.

Alcoholics are utterly dear one minute, but there is also a blanket hatred with which you cannot reason.

You’re never going to get 2,400 people a night for a play. I’m sorry, you really aren’t.

People are surprised because I drive a Jaguar XK sports car and say the occasional intelligent thing. People think I’m an exception, but I’m typical of a lot of women of my age.

I love beautiful women. I’m not jealous of them at all.

I was chancellor of Portsmouth University.

I think why I’m sometimes fearless is because I’ve found, and this comes with age, if you challenge something your fear goes away.

On ‘The X Factor,’ they deliberately have people on that are awful just to laugh at them.

Acting is a job and it pays the rent. I don’t do it for fun.

I would say that Beethoven’s late string quartets are the nearest to God that we’ll ever get.

You have to look for a new way of life. You have to turn your life around. It is up to you whether it is going to be viable.

I would have loved to have been beautiful; to have looked in the mirror and said: ‘God you look wonderful.’ Do people do that, I wonder. Love what they see in the mirror?

In 1971, my mother died of cancer and within a year my first husband Alec Ross died, also from cancer.

I cannot pass by seeing a child shouted at, and people dropping litter. I’m terrible for intervening. There’s nothing worse than busybodies like me. I should learn to mind my own business.

We should be so grateful for musicals, and the amount of work that goes into these shows is easily comparable to things I’ve been in at the National and the RSC. Why do we think it is less important?.

That’s why I’m grumpy all the time. Absolutely. Because your ideal never happens. Nothing ever goes right. But the thing about getting older is that you do accept it.

There isn’t a carer in the world who doesn’t say, ‘I hate it. My life is being ruined. I didn’t see my life like this.’

I always find it a bit embarrassing when people sing ‘Auld Lang Syne.’ Nobody knows when it finishes, so it goes on and on.

Just as our bodies need to be exercised, so, perhaps, do our brains.

I was terribly ambitious: I was always thinking why wasn’t I in the West End. I really wasted my whole youth.

I wish I could say I was wise and clever, but I’m really not.

I got myself into hot water with the press in 2014 by suggesting that the art installation of poppies in the Tower of London moat should be completed by being malevolently mown down by a tank, in the way that the service men and women whom the poppies represented had been.

I used to pray every night: ‘Please let me look all right from the front.’ I didn’t care about real life, but I wanted to look good for theatre audiences – I worried about having a funny nose.

When you lose someone you have two choices. You can stay stuck where you are or you can say, ‘I am now on my own, my life has changed and I need to change the way I operate.’

I’ve never been one of those nanas who pretends to be young.

I can’t keep my trap shut in interviews – I’m not very good at dissembling.

I don’t really despise anyone.

I was always a girl who wanted to please her dad, and he so wanted me to succeed.

Around a quarter of cancers eventually spread to the brain. As people live longer, their risk of developing cancer increases; as cancer survival rates improve, their risk of developing secondary tumours in the brain increases. We can therefore expect increasing numbers of brain-tumour patients.

I used to be the sort of person who’d listen to a taxi driver going on about the-country-going-to-the-dogs-blah-blah, and let him rant on. But now I don’t. I find myself letting rip.

Being a grandma is lovely.

I was struck during the Brexit debate by how little discussion there was about the origins of the concept of a united Europe.

Like Pinter and Orton, the writer, Clive Exton, catches the poetry of modern everyday speech, which, whether we like it or not, includes four-letter words used as verbs, nouns, adverbs and adjectives. But, God, is it difficult to learn.

I live in a perpetual state of fear.

I wouldn’t dream of giving any human being marks out of 10 on two hours‘ acquaintance.

I like being on my own, but at times when I don’t, I’ll phone a friend or the grandchildren.

My own efforts at peacemaking have been easy – in fact, rather enjoyable: CND marches, demos, protest meetings in Trafalgar and Grosvenor Squares, and visits to the women at Greenham, especially the glorious day in 1983 when thousands of us embraced the base and pinned beautiful pictures and objects to the ugly wire.

Inventing characters is extraordinary: proper authors say so often that characters ‘just appear‘ and that does happen. These people keep leaping out and saying, why don’t you write about me?

I’m a realist.

Christmas Eve is my wedding anniversary so it is a double whammy.

On the night of Brexit, while some people were celebrating and others were having wakes, I stayed in and played Beethoven, his quartets mainly, into the small hours of the morning.

In some ways I’m quite strict – in terms of morality, honesty, things like that. And manners.

As a child, I was deeply religious and went to church every Sunday.