Emily Watson

And elsewhere and all over the place was my salvation in that because it sort of kept that part of me alive.

And my parents really fed that.

They didn't enforce a lot of the strictness.

But I think there was very much an expectation for women that you would become a wife and a mother, maybe a teacher, but that...

The idea of having a career and being ambitious and all of those things was, I'm sure things have changed now, but it was very much the idea of being independent was very frowned on.

And did you see any of that?

I did see some of it and I think I navigated it by keeping my head down and being a good girl for as long as I could stomach that.

Certainly while I was at school, as I got older, then I just sort of questioned it more and more and more and when the logic of life is staring you in the face, you go, well, hang on a minute, that doesn't make sense and that doesn't make sense.

When did that start to happen for you?

Well, really as a teenager, I mean, I sort of had the urge...

not to be there and to leave.

And I went off to university and I, for a while, I was sort of felt like I was leading a double life because I was doing, you know, leading a normal life and going out and doing everything that young people do.

But at the same time, I was returning every week to these sessions and to the point where it didn't make sense anymore.

And then we had a kind of a falling out over me doing Breaking the Waves, which...

That was the break between you and... Yeah, that was the sort of beginning of the end.

I mean, it still took me a while to extricate myself.

I think when you've grown up in that situation, the fear of leaving something is wired in if you've been born to it.

What was that like for you kind of working that out?

I was thinking about this on the car on the way here, that in relation to music, when I was five years old, I was asked to write a piece of music, to set a piece of scripture to music.

And I chose a sentence, I think it's in either Bhagavad Gita or the Upanishads, which says, ''They who deny the self return to a godless birth, blind, enveloped in darkness.''