Cartoon capers

How do you feel about playing a cartoon character, rather than being able to give a visual performance? I have done quite a lot of voices in my time. I have a distinctive voice, and through the years of work that I've done, my voice is well known. I'm often asked purely on the level of my voice - it literally led to Harry Potter. I play the Sorting Hat and I've had a wonderful reaction to that.

I was also asked to voice a video game called Gex. It was absolutely wild American dialogue and I had to make it work for English, so we more or less did it as we went along. It was quite interesting. The voice is very important - it's the most important thing you've got as an actor, it's your best tool really.

I'm very interested in getting [things] over to the public through [the use of the] voice - through timing, selling the dialogue that you have to sell and the way that it has to be done. There are so many people who've been brought up through television, which I wasn't, that do tend to rely upon a microphone hanging above their head.

I was brought up in the theatre, so I was very seriously brought up to deliver right to the back of the theatre. My first job was at the Palladium and my second job at Covent Garden. I had an extraordinary experience of being told to, 'Give your voice, to reach the back', and diction becoming very important, so that's really my original start in the business. It's affected me right through the years, even now, of course, in Shakespeare, so I find the voice a very good, very important tool.