[T]here were only certain jobs open to women. Things like hairdressing didn't really interest me. I might have been interested in photography, but wo… - Anne V. Coates

We had mostly pilots in the hospital, [...] and kids who had been playing with bombs they found on the ground and stuff. Pretty harroing, actually but it was intriguing for me just to be meeting other people (en) it opened my mind to communism and things like that which shocked my family.

[On out-takes during the filming of Becket featuring Richard Burton and Peter O'Toole, two notoriously heavy drinkers] Oh, on the beach, they were having a real problem sitting on their horses. It’s a beautiful shot of the beach and I go from a very long shot of galloping into a big head. I had fun with it, but it was difficult. Because they were flubbing their lines, we had to shoot over two days. The clouds are there one day but not the next, and nobody notices that because the actors are so magnetic. The horses were perfectly well behaved, but it was mainly the boys who were trouble.

I used to have to get my courage up to offer my ideas to David Lean, but that improved as time went on. He used to say to me, "That’s a ridiculous idea, I’ve never heard of such a thing." And I would feel awful. But then he would come up to me a day or two later and say, "You know that idea you had, it's not exactly that but it's close.” It was always worth putting up the ideas. I'm not crushed if they don't want to use them, it's a point of view.