“My dad's so likeable, you wouldn't feel in competition with him. If an...” — Julia Sawalha Quote

My dad's so likeable, you wouldn't feel in competition with him. If any boyfriends have ever felt that, they're long gone.

It's not so much that I'd like to play a raunchy character, but I would like to play someone my own age. I'm always playing down, but I guess it's good because it means I've got a longer life in my acting career.

It distresses me when I take my seven-year-old nephew out. I cook healthy food, and he wants to go to McDonald's. He doesn't even like the food; he just wants the toys, the Happy Meals. I can't stand to see people walking down the street eating fast food.

After playing Saffy in 'Ab Fab', I needed to take time out from acting to see if I really wanted to do it. I had been doing it for a very long time and I was being sent the same sort of scripts again and again.

My parents are kind of young, and my dad always listened to rock music and stuff like that, so I sort of grew up around that. As far as acting goes, I didn't really have any major influences because it wasn't really something that I focused on.

When I was 13, I won a scholarship to boarding school. My parents let me choose whether to go, and I decided I wanted to. Afterwards, I went to Cambridge to study law - in a way, I was carrying the academic hopes of my family, as Mum and Dad left school at 14.

There was always music in our home. My mom and my dad loved music. I remember when we were kids we would have these great parties at the house with congas and bongos and African drums, and it was amazing. It wasn't until years later that I found out that they were actually Black Panther meetings.

All the learnin' my father paid for was a bit o' birch at one end and an alphabet at the other.