My secondary schooling was at Marlborough College, Wiltshire, so I'm fond of that part of the world. It's quintessentially English, with village greens, pubs and cricket pitches, and resonates strongly with me.
I grew up in a very rural community in England.
I loved living in Hollywood - and the weather there was just fantastic - but there is something about rural England, and especially Suffolk and Norfolk, that pulls at my heartstrings.
English country life is more like Chekhov than 'The Archers' or Thomas Hardy or even the Updike ethic with which it is sometimes compared.
The English countryside is the most staggeringly beautiful place. I can't spend as much time there as I like, but I like everything about it. I like fishing, I like clay- pigeon shooting.
I lived a normal life for a number of years. I had kids. I lived up on a farm in Gloucestershire in rural England, and just kind of got back to reality again.
My favorite book of all time is Cold Comfort Farm, by Stella Gibbons.
My own conviction is, confirmed by a very close study of parochial registers, that some of the very best blood in England is to be found among the tradesmen of our county towns.
Every one knows that there are no real forests in England.The deer in the parks of the great are demurely domestic cattle, fat as London alderman.
An awful lot of England is slowly eroding, in ways that I find really distressing, and an awful lot of it is the hedgerows... We're reaching the point where a lot of the English countryside looks just like Iowa - just kind of open space.
Living in England, provincial England, must be like being married to a stupid but exquisitely beautiful wife.
When you're on this major English estate, breathing in the English air, and it's untouched, you can feel its presence. It's a whole different feel. It really felt like we were there living it. It didn't feel modern, ever.
I sometimes think the only true record of England is the 'Cumberland News.'
I've stayed in houses that were in the country, and in England, but I'm still not sure that I've stayed in an English country house.
I remember thinking this is everything that England means to me. The huge, flat landscapes with deep reds and greens. Daunting and terrifying and incredible. We should see it more on film, I think.
I think protecting rural England is more important than any work I do as an actress.
Midsomer Murders' is more about character and atmosphere. It portrays a kind of idealised rural England, just as the French like to imagine it.
Ursula and Gudrun Brangwen sat one morning in the window-bay of their father's house in Beldover, working and talking.
Pagford, which by night was no more than a cluster of twinkling lights in a dark hollow far below, was emerging into chilly sunlight.
Only in the English countryside could violent death remain something that is 'cosy.'
In that pleasant district of merry England which is watered by the river Don, there extended in ancient times a large forest, covering the greater part of the beautiful hills and valleys which lie between Sheffield and the pleasant town of Doncaster.
