Emily Mortimer

I was terribly shy when I was growing up, I really wasn't confident with other people and I think I was always afraid of up or not being this very cool, amazing person that I wanted to be.

Some people come alive at night. I'm hopeless by 9 p.m. Coffee and Cadbury buy me an extra half hour. Often I can't get my clothes off I'm so far gone.

I'd been shy since childhood, constantly full of self-doubt. And as an actor, I'd been so scared of failing that I made my career - and myself - a big joke.

I'm physically completely mal-coordinated. My best friend used to make me run for the bus just to give herself a quick, cheap laugh because I definitely don't have that sophisticated cool thing down.

New York is great, but I miss L.A. - I feel like there was something exotic about L.A. that I kind of underestimated at the time. It was very unfamiliar to me.

In my first few years as an actor, I took one terrible TV job after another. But even as I laughed off my awful roles and made fun of myself to friends, my work made me cringe - I dreaded anyone's...

I'm always drawn to the thing I think I can't possibly do, because I tend to be better when I think I can't possibly do something than I am when I'm pretty sure I can do something.

Normal people, who can be good people but do bad things, are very interesting to me, and people that never get a parking ticket or never do a bad thing in their lives can be really dangerous.

But I have to grow out of it, because it's very boring, really. Even when you're telling people how crap you are, you're still banging on about yourself.

I'm still shy - I'm no good at my children's parent-teacher conferences, and I'm slowly learning how to ask for what I want. But I now know that I have a reserve of courage to draw upon when I really...