Every actor wants to be versatile; everyone wants to do something different.

I'm a song and dance girl. I can act enough to get by. But that's the limit of my talents.

The theatre starts every night at half past seven, and I like the rhythm of going to the theatre, parking the car, going to the stage door; I've grown up with all of that. I'd love to do more theatre...

Every little thing that people know about you as a person impedes your ability to achieve that kind of terrific suspension of disbelief that happens when an audience goes with an actor and character...

Sometimes I get a little confused because with dancing I can express my emotions with my body. With acting you have to do it with your face and your expressions, and then with animated shows you have...

When I started studying acting, I was enamoured of actors who used movement to enhance the language.

Sometimes you go to a show, and you see someone and think they're not there right now. They're performing, but it's muscle memory. There is no memorising some of the ways we put on a show.

What musical performers bring to straight characterizations is that physical flexibility that comes with knowing your body so well. A lot of actors are terribly awkward. Terribly. And I think it's so...

It looks better when you do your own stunts, because seeing somebody's face when they're doing them is fun for the audience.

Improv is mostly what I've studied.

I grew up in show business, so I always knew I was going to be a dancer or a performer. I knew that was my business.

You've got to love acting and that's true for me. I love the idea of getting on stage and getting in front of a camera.

I love to sing with my daughter. Audiences like it because a mother-daughter pairing is a curiosity.

Variety has always been in my mind: to do something totally different. I've had a parallel career since the beginning. On one track, the TV and film, the other, theatre, but they never crossed.

We come from a live background of sketch improv and standup.

All actors know that the real adrenaline rush is in doing theatre. There is an immediate connect, and a role in a play, for an actor, is the biggest temptation.

I often play characters on TV shows that are more sweet and naive and just kind of puppy-dog eyes, and I don't think I am like that as a person.

I think the wonderful thing about doing theater is that it's more of an actor's medium. I think that film is more of a director's medium. You can't edit something out on stage. It's there.

I was like, 18 and it was in West Virginia because I was allowed to get into the clubs in West Virginia, not Pennsylvania where I was growing up. And we went in and there was a drag queen on stage and...

Writers and musicians are very similar in that the chances of making a life in either field are so infinitesimal. And once you're in, the chances of staying viable are difficult. But there is...

The more I know about America, the better I'll be at performing American characters and American stories.

If I get two lines in the script, I somehow turn it into 20. I've got a bit of a bad habit of doing that, of just embellishing my little moment.

I realized that I found a lot of solace in performing and found parts of myself that I was perhaps too reluctant or too scared to go to... so I kind of fell in love with it from a young age.

I think of myself as an actor.

Everything that came to me, in terms of the ritzier side of performing, was a plus.

A lot of acting is sitting and waiting.

Stand-up is more of an organic process. An imagined dialogue with the audience.

SDC has a great reputation for putting live music on stage.

Then, in 2000, John Reid, Elton John's former manager, asked me to audition for the stage version of The Graduate he was producing. So I worked on it, got the part, and after three weeks' rehearsal I...

I was a Spanish dancer. I don't mean to put that down, because that was great, too, but nothing like the kind of dancing you had to do in 'West Side Story,' which was called jazz.