- "A few months ago, I was selling make-up. Now I should concentrate on being grateful that I can pay the rent for a while."

- "If I'm honest, I still feel like a student. I'm not entirely sure what I'm doing here."

- "If you do this big film, it will open the doors for all these other brilliant things. But you have to do the big film first. It's like the Keira Knightley thing: everyone ridiculed her for doing the Pirates films, but she's getting great parts now. She can choose whatever she wants."

- "I think it's difficult for a young girl like me, because there's a certain time for young actresses, which is like a really juicy period when all the parts are love interests and young heroines. Of course, there's always work for men, whatever age they are. So I'm really going to go for it. And if it all goes wrong, I'll go and do panto."

- "I'd love to play Eliza Doolittle in Pygmalion because the story is so similar to mine. Not that I'm a right Cockney sparrow or anything, but I was a bit less refined a few years ago, ha ha!"

- "I actually went to a grammar school in Gravesend and everyone was intelligent, I was good really. I was the creative one, a bit lippy but not in a bad way, in a silly way. A girl got expelled for sniffing lighter fluid, that was the biggest hoo-hah."

- "Once you've done a big film, more films come your way if you're good. Or even if you're not good. I've got so much stuff coming up, and one of them is incredible. I so want to tell you about it, but if I told you, I'd have to kill you."

- On her character in St Trinian's:
"You don't need to show flesh to get attention. My character is womanly but sophisticated."

- On St Trinian's:
"People think of St Trinian's as the sexualisation of schoolkids, but our film is more about girl power. It's the message we really want to push. I don't think there's a point in the film where the girls aren't in control: they're doing the trampling rather than being trampled on."

- On her MI6 agent's love scenes with James Bond in Quantum of Solace:
"I felt like a giggly girl, and I felt so young and inexperienced - but I kissed James Bond!"

- On her character in Quantum of Solace:
"She's fresh and young, not sultry and a femme fatale."

- "She has a luminous presence... the film world is really going to want her."
Oliver Parker (St Trinian's director)

- "Gemma has the modern look and fits perfectly with the new vulnerable image of Bond."
EON Productions (Quantum of Solace producers)

- "Olga and Gemma are going to be amazing. They're both very sexy ladies, which is very good. Olga's the main 'Bond girl' in the movie but Gemma's no less important."
Daniel Craig (Quantum of Solace co-star)