Explore popular quotes and sayings by Sheila Hancock.
Last updated on December 21, 2024.
Dame Sheila Cameron Hancock is an English actress, singer, and author. Hancock trained at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art before starting her career in repertory theatre. Hancock went on to perform in plays and musicals in London, and her Broadway debut in Entertaining Mr Sloane (1966) earned her a Tony Award nomination for Best Lead Actress in Play.
I love beautiful women. I'm not jealous of them at all.
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 can't keep my trap shut in interviews - I'm not very good at dissembling.
There is always something to engross you in life.
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.
Christmas Eve is my wedding anniversary so it is a double whammy.
You know, life is about loss and recovering and starting again. It gets a bit more difficult to start again the older you get. But you can do it, you can do it.
I would say that Beethoven's late string quartets are the nearest to God that we'll ever get.
Even for those who do survive, tumours can affect the functions of the brain and therefore affect a person's personality, preventing many people from working, driving and otherwise leading a normal life.
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 was always a girl who wanted to please her dad, and he so wanted me to succeed.
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.
I much prefer grandmotherhood to motherhood.
I love being in my car with Radio 3 on.
I always keep my script in the wings - a hangover from my rep days when we had no prompter and, if all else failed, I would make an excuse and rush off the stage to have a quick look.
In 1971, my mother died of cancer and within a year my first husband Alec Ross died, also from cancer.
I've always used diaries to pour out my feelings at the end of each day, as a sort of therapy.
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 would love to enjoy leisure, but I find it very difficult to sit down and do nothing.
As a Quaker, I aspire to be a pacifist.
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.
I was chancellor of Portsmouth University.
In my early music-loving days, I thought Beethoven was a bit bombastic, a bit heroic, a bit, well, big.
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.
My chin's too big. And my nose - my nose is funny.
When I think about the friends who've died, and sadly there's a lot of mine, there are certain people you can virtually see.
It's wonderful to be with people of a younger generation. it really is.
On the whole, I think journalists have been kind about me, but they do make me sound a bit of a dreary cow. There seems to be so much suffering in my life.
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.
I was this sort of floozy in 'The Rag Trade,' and 'Mr Digby Darling,' and 'Now, Take My Wife' - the titles say it all.
As a child, I was deeply religious and went to church every Sunday.
I have never met anybody who can change their point of view as easily as me. It's profoundly embarrassing.
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.
Alcoholics are utterly dear one minute, but there is also a blanket hatred with which you cannot reason.
I am a far better grandmother than I was a mother. My daughters would back me up on this. As a mother I was busy, preoccupied and obsessive about John and my life with him. My children got overlooked. But my grandchildren never get overlooked.
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.
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?
Being a grandma is lovely.
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.
In some ways I'm quite strict - in terms of morality, honesty, things like that. And manners.
I always find it a bit embarrassing when people sing 'Auld Lang Syne.' Nobody knows when it finishes, so it goes on and on.
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 love cars with a passion.
I do think that people leave 'vibes' behind, and the best that I can hope is that I leave a few good vibes, as well as the bad ones.
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.
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 can't do solitude.
My husband John Thaw worked with many directors, some of whom cut their teeth working on the 'Sweeney,' 'Kavanagh QC' and 'Morse' before going on to illustrious careers.
Prompting children to create imaginary worlds is hugely important.
I was struck during the Brexit debate by how little discussion there was about the origins of the concept of a united Europe.
If you're creating a story, it's a lovely sort of secret thing going on in your head.
I've never been one of those nanas who pretends to be young.
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.
Acting is a job and it pays the rent. I don't do it for fun.
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?
Learning a musical instrument is challenging, it demands fine motor skills and coordination. It develops children's listening, thinking skills, imagination and perseverance. It brings out the very best in the children as they work collaboratively with their peers and teachers.
I talk too much and I don't listen or pause to think.
I'm actually involved with DigiSmart, a project to get nine-11-year-olds to love books.
I do like Christmas but the build-up is ludicrous. Such a kerfuffle about two meals and a few presents.
Just as our bodies need to be exercised, so, perhaps, do our brains.