It wasn't being an alcoholic - it was going wild. It happened when I got famous. It was like having my teens in my early thirties: blotting out your life not having to think about anything.

Well I would say that we're regular people first of all and we're normal and it's obvious by some of the things that have happened just because our name is famous we're not immune to tragedy.

I have a profound empathy for people who are in the public eye whether they manifest it themselves or whether it happened by accident - it doesn't matter to me. I think there's a great misunderstanding of what it is to be famous.

As a novelist I mined my history my family and my memory but in a very specific way. Writing fiction I never made use of experiences immediately as they happened. I needed to let things fester in my memory mature and transmogrify into something meaningful.

Today the Iraqi citizen sees that America is coming and wants to occupy his country and kill him and he is willing to experience for himself what happened in Palestine.

No matter how close to personal experience a story might be inevitably you are going to get to a part that isn't yours and actually whether it happened or not becomes irrelevant. It is all about choosing the right words.

A few years' experience will convince us that those things which at the time they happened we regarded as our greatest misfortunes have proved our greatest blessings.

As an actor you just want to work and then you just want to be on a show or have a job that you love and you hope that job will last - those things have happened. To have that platform to then talk about something that is very personal to me like marriage equality it feels like a gift. I try and really respect that voice and not abuse it.

What's really sad is that so many young women between the ages of 16 and 25 are ignorant and they already believe that women get the same pay as men. They don't even really understand that equality hasn't happened with the pay force.

And my career the things that have happened have happened because of my music education background.