HELEN MCCRORY ACTRESS

Film

I couldn't go to the premiere of The Queen [in which McCrory plays Cherie Blair] because I'd given birth to my daughter Manon three days earlier. I watched the film from my hospital bed on a small television. I saw The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada with Tommy Lee Jones. It has the epic journey of the Western but really it is contemplation on forgiveness and retribution. It is about a man who has committed a murder and how you can live your life having committed such an act. I went to see Keane - a film that Damian [Lewis, her husband] starred in.

Books

I am just about to start How To Be Free by Tom Hodgkinson, editor of The Idler. He also wrote How To Be Idle, but I didn't need to read that; I was doing fine. It is about appreciating the simple things in life. I'm about to finish Nana by Zola. I'm also reading things like Calpol medicine instructions and anything written on baby products. What to Expect the First Year, by Arlene Eisenberg, Heidi E Murkoff and Sandee E Hathaway, is a great book.

Music

I'm one of those people who still has to have a record player and tapes in my kitchen. We do have a CD player in the sitting room. I listen to music all day. I bought three CDs this week - Blondie, Parallel Lines, Dizzy Gillespie, Professor of Bebop, and Miriam Makeba, The Click Song. When I was a little girl in Africa I used to dance to her music. It is something to dance with Manon in the morning.

Theatre & opera

Marianne Elliott's production of Much Ado About Nothing is superlative. It's set in Cuba - I've got no understanding of why but I don't care. It is just about to open in the West End as part of the RSC season. Rock'n'Roll by Tom Stoppard is my favourite by him. I find Stoppard often, for my taste, intellectually very rigorous but it doesn't actually touch my heartstrings and this I thought did both. The Voysey Inheritance at the National Theatre was so good I went to see it twice. Dominic West was superb.

'The Queen' is out now

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