Look if you ask a child 'Would you rather have a fulfilled mother or a stay-at-home Sylvia Plath ' they'll pick Sylvia Plath every time. But I think it's really important that children don't feel their parents' emotional lives depend on their success.

I'm hopefully touring with Colin Baker next year in Perfect Strangers. I have performed with Sylvia Simms in poetry and music evenings. I would love to do those for the rest of my career - they are so fun and witty.

It's rather splendid to think of all those great men and women who appear to have presented symptoms that allow us to describe them as bipolar. Whether it's Hemingway Van Gogh... Robert Schumann has been mentioned... Virginia Woolf Sylvia Plath... some of them with rather grim ends.

It was a wonderful experience to work with Sylvia. She pushed me to be more powerful with my acting and she told me scores of the most incredible stories I've ever heard. She is amazing.