He lived with Marie-Lise Volpeliere-Pierrot from 1967-83, when she was killed in a riding accident.

Son of a clergyman.

Trained to become a painter at Grimsby Art School.

Studied at RADA.

He is an Associate of RADA.

He did the film History of the World: Part I (1981) because he had just gotten through doing two seriously dramatic films and said that he wanted to have fun and do a comedy.

Awarded the CBE (Commander of the Order of the British Empire) in the 2004 Queen's Birthday Honours List for services to Drama.

Has two sons with Dalton: Nicolas and Alexander.

Has worked with two Boromirs. In Ralph Bakshi's film The Lord of the Rings (1978), he played the voice of Aragorn, opposite Michael Graham Cox as Boromir, who went on to reprise the role for BBC radio. He later appeared in The Field with Sean Bean, who played the role in Peter Jackson's adaptation.

His mother opened a school at his father's vicarage when he was five.

Is the youngest of three sons.

Father was a vicar in Derbyshire.

Spoofs his role from Alien (1979) in Spaceballs (1987)

26th January 2006, received an honorary Doctorate in Letters from the University of Hull, Yorkshire.

Was not the first choice for the role of "Kane" in Alien (1979). He was brought in on the second day of filming after John Finch (the original actor cast for the role) was diagnosed with a severe case of diabetes and taken to hospital.

One of his two brothers became a monk.

As Winston Smith in Nineteen Eighty-Four he portrays a victim of a totalitarian society, with Big Brother as its head. In V for Vendetta, he portrays the Big Brother type leader "Chancellor Sutler"

"I've done some stinkers in the cinema. You can't regret it; there are always reasons for doing something, even if it's just the location."

"We are all racing towards death. No matter how many great, intellectual conclusions we draw during our lives, we know they're all only man-made, like God. I begin to wonder where it all leads. What can you do, except do what you can do as best you know how."

"People like us, who turn ourselves inside out for a living, we get into an emotional tussle rather than a marriage. It's fire I'm playing with and it isn't surprising I'm not the ideal companion on a daily basis. But it takes two. I mean, Christ, I haven't forced anybody."

"St Michael's was one of those very rarefied, very Anglo-Catholic establishments where they rejoiced in more religious paraphernalia and theatricality than the entire Vatican. More incense-swinging, more crucifixes, more gold tassels, more rose petals, more holy mothers, more God knows what. Three times a day they played the Angelus. When you heard it, you had to stop whatever you were doing, do the Hail Marys in your head, and then return to what you were doing. Like it would come in the middle of a Latin class. I'm just conjugating the love verb, amo, amas, amat, and doingggg! you have to stand up, go through the whole Angelus, mother-of-God thing and then crack on with amamus, amatis, amant. Sir! Because, if you didn't, Whack! Cane. Belt. Education by fear. And the really funny thing was they wouldn't tolerate bullying between peers. Prefects could bash you with a slipper, but you weren't allowed to give each other a rough time. Like who do you think you are? You haven't yet earned the privilege of being violent."

"My parents' lot had literally crawled away from the second world war, taking with them two vital commodities by way of a survival mechanism: respectability and security. It was odd, coming from a Christian household, but the big thing was about not being what they called 'common'. I got all that, 'Don't play with him, he's common'. I had a friend called Grenville Barker who'd come round sometimes and play football on the lawn, but not very often. And I wasn't allowed to go to his home very often because they were working class. He was what my mother called a bad influence. Everything had to do with influence. My mother was desperate I should be properly influenced, have a proper, received accent, be sent away to school at eight. So all you can do is go into yourself, immerse yourself in your own life."

"I couldn't possibly do that. To be able to understand being five years old and write as if you were that age through the book till you get to that extraordinary flowery-pretentious age of the 18-, 19-year-old. It's so complicated when you're dealing with memory because of the perspective and how it keeps changing. You have to learn how you see things. It's about ... lordy-me, I've forgotten the word. This time in the morning. Never mind, come to me in a moment, let's have more coffee... conditioning."

"There is no such thing as all good people and all bad people. We're all capable. It exists within us. In war-time, as we're finding out now, things that have been on camera, our wonderful troops, who we felt were absolutely impeccable, were as guilty as everybody else of... If you're given license to kill, it's going to release many an evil."

"Someone once asked me, "Is there anything you regret?" and I said, "Everything!" Whatever you do, there was always a better choice."

"I've always felt, and I think I'm qualified to say so because I've won a few awards, that it's a terrible shame to put something in competition with something else to be able to sell something. Confronted with films like Brokeback Mountain and Capote and the Johnny Cash movie [Walk the Line], you can't pit one against the other. Films are not made to be competitive in that sense."

"'If' and 'only' are the two words in the English language that should never be put together."

"You know, I've never guided my life . I've just been whipped along by the waves I'm sitting in... I don't make plans at all. Plans are what make God laugh. You can make plans, you can make so many plans, but they never go right, do they?"

"Also the wonderful thing about film, you can see light at the end of the tunnel. You did realize that it is going to come to an end at some stage."

"I first decided that I wanted to act when I was 9. And I was at a very bizarre prep school at the time, to say high Anglo-Catholic would be a real English understatement."

"I've spent a great deal of my life doing independent film, and that is partly because the subject matter interests me and partly because that is the basis of the film industry. That's where the filmmakers come from, it's where they start and sometimes its where they should have stayed."