'I've had therapy for lots of things over the years'

IT'S A FUNNY OLD WORLD

- GEMMA CALVERT

THIS WEEK'S COLUMNIST Actor and author Ben Miller

"As an actor and writer, you can always improve your craft, and the more acting you do, you realise that less is more. Often I'll be asked by a director to stare at a mark on a wall, then walk off again. It's actually part of film theory. Behaving in a uninflected way on screen is vivid for the audience. The more you try to act, the less convincing it is.

Of course, acting is a hard profession to break into because you can't get good until you do it, but you often can't get work until you're experienced. I started out in the late 1980s by doing as much live performance as I could, and performing comedy with my friend Alexander Armstrong after meeting outside a World Party gig in Cambridge in 1992.