Emily Watson

She was an English teacher, yeah.

She was a very good English teacher, actually.

I have occasionally people come up to me

on the tube and say, excuse me.

And I think they want to say, oh, I saw you in blah, blah, blah.

And they say, your mum was my English teacher.

And I still remember her and she was amazing.

Yeah, no, I mean, we had because of the way we were brought up, we weren't supposed to engage with popular culture so much.

We didn't have a television, but I read a lot of books and my mum really fed that.

She didn't, you know, they didn't sort of buy into the sort of strictest version of what our lives were supposed to be.

She used to go to the secondhand bookshop at the end of the road and come home at the end of the week with just a big pile of books and I would devour them.

I read War and Peace when I was 11.

I think I had a race with a friend at school because we had to entertain ourselves in those days.

My mum was very much a wordsmith, loved Shakespeare and introduced me to Shakespeare at a young age.

We went to see the RSC when I was seven, I think.

I saw a production of As You Like It and Much About Nothing.

I remember sort of practically stopping the show because I was laughing so much.

I just loved it.

This is part of the soundtrack to Mon Oncle by Jacques Tati.

And one of the things that my parents did, which was amazing, was they took us to the cinema.