Finty Williams

Dad was much more critical. I did a comedy in Windsor and he came round afterwards with a load of paperwork and said nothing about my performance - just: 'I've got some forms for you to sign.'

I love being surrounded by my family at weekends.

I can't think of many places I'd rather spend Saturday afternoon than in a tattoo parlor.

I adore tattoos. They're not painful; you just get an urge to swear a lot.

Saturday afternoon I'll go shopping. Always. I can find things to buy wherever I am.

I was 18 and had an inverted light bulb moment where I thought that nothing I could do or say or how I looked was ever going to be good enough.

The way I got through thinking that I was very boring and very unsparkly was by being the first person in the bar and being the person that bought the drinks for everyone.

I've got a terrible crush on someone and last week mum was coaching me - it was a real masterclass - on how to very casually say hello to him. I had to talk to her hand. Tears were pouring down our faces.

Who wouldn't want to work with someone you so utterly respect and you're such good friends with?

It's an amazingly daunting prospect to play any part you've seen someone else play brilliantly.

There are a lot of people who are very willing to put my mother on a pedestal, which is a lonely existence. She wants to dispute that so much that she will literally do anything for anybody.

It's a knack that my mother doesn't have. The only audiobook she ever did she had to leave after the first day, because she couldn't string two sentences together. It's about the only thing she can't do.

Ironically at drama school I was told I didn't have a voice conducive for radio.

I don't know whether, if your father is a brain surgeon, people go, 'He's not as good a brain surgeon as his father.' I don't know whether that happens, but because of who Ma is, a lot of people have an opinion, which they form before they get to know me or before they see what I can do.

I don't know under what lighting I can play Juliet. Maybe with a small night light illuminating the stage.

If she wasn't my mother, I'd want her to be my best friend.

I don't aspire to have her career, or to be as talented as her, because I'd feel like I was shooting myself down in flames. If you have a parent who is that successful and set them as a benchmark, then everything is going to be disappointing.

I spent most of my teenage years in the National Theatre.

I've worked with a couple of people in my career that have stopped me dead in my tracks because they make it look so effortless and so extraordinary. One of them is Ben Daniels and the other is Chris Larkin.

Some jobs you take because they are good for the heart.

I had one critic who wrote: 'Finty Williams is like her mother in looks if not in talent.' It'll be on my gravestone.

My mother very bravely put me into rehab two weeks after my father died.

I happen to think Ruth Wilson is jaw-droppingly brilliant.

Ma did a play called 'Entertaining Strangers' when I was about 14, which totally changed my life, I loved it so much.

I think Ma is more honest than I am sometimes.