And I felt I'd rather not have that total responsibility for a while

And I felt I'd rather not have that total responsibility for a while".Hence the undemanding Hollywood roles - coming to the surface and catching up on the tan between bouts of full Shakespeare immersion. But there is a risk in taking such a breezy approach to one's filmography - the risk being that the general public, encouraged by the sort of "Who's in, who's out" journalism that Lee Simon embodies in Celebrity, will see Branagh as someone who has simply lost control of his career. After all, this is the man who once said "my definition of success is control".Being confronted with former quotes is almost as bad as being confronted with former girlfriends, and Branagh now considers this to be "a stupid remark". So what would be Branagh's current definition of success? "It's some sense of creative freedom when it comes to directing," he says.

"The freedom to pursue those projects you care very passionately about, and then the freedom to do them in a way that you believe in, and not be confined by, these days, the incredible pressures put on film-making, from casting to budget to the marketing to the preview process and all the rest of it .. you somehow find a way to have your voice in that. That's success for me, really".The project he cares very passionately about at the moment is Love's Labour's Lost, his first stab at Shakespeare in the three years since Hamlet. Couched in the form of a 1930s musical, with songs courtesy of Cole Porter and Irving Berlin, it will be released in the autumn.Every actor, they say, ends up in a Woody Allen film sooner or later. Plenty of actors have also queued up to do Shakespeare with Ken Now Branagh is in a Woody Allen film Surely the logical next step would be .. but this, it seems, has already been tried.

"I once had the idea of asking Woody Allen to appear in one of my films. After a while I got a very politely worded letter back from him asking me what I'd been smoking when I made the request."'Celebrity' is released on Friday. People have used art as a way of adding cachet to advertising campaigns ever since people started putting Constable paintings on biscuit tins or packets of fudge. When football went operatic in the 1990 World Cup, it only intensified a modern trend, and these days no television commercial is complete without the backing of a smooth classic from some great composer. But in choosing William Blake as one of the defining spirits of the Millennium Dome, the powers that be have taken an interesting gamble.