Celebrities reveal their bedtime secrets

1. Likes to wander in the middle of the night

The Oscar-winning actor reveals how she has a habit of wandering around when she should be in bed. “I like to have little excuses to get up in the night,” Cate says.

“I always go walking.” It isn’t insomnia, but a quest for solitude: “I love being up when no one else is awake. No one’s gonna talk to you.”

2. The actor once shaved her head

“I have been bald… I’ve had my head shaved,” Cate confesses. She looks back at the teenage act of rebellion with a degree of fondness. “I think when you’ve got lots of hair, shaving it off feels kind of like an act of bravery,” says the actor. “It was quite a nice feeling.”

3. She feels sorry for pigeons

“I feel terribly, terribly sorry for pigeons,” says Cate. It’s all because of “those little barbs” used to prevent the birds from perching on buildings. “If you’re a pigeon, those spikes are like a third of your body length,” she says. “Can you imagine walking around, as a human being, in a world wherever you wanted to sit down” there were “spikes that were a metre-and-a-half high?” she asks.

5. The poet practises Tai Chi every day

Benjamin takes time to practise the martial art of Tai Chi every single day. “I love it,” says the writer. “Just before I go to sleep I’ll do some Tai Chi breathing, just to make sure I relax.”

The key, he says, is to “make sure that you’ve got no tension in your body,” then “imagine a little spot two inches below your belly button. You focus your mind on that little space – you keep breathing there and you should eventually just fall into blissful sleep.”

6. Is scared of the dark

The BAFTA-winning actor admits that she is a little bit scared of the dark, and it’s all to do with her childhood. “It reminds me of when I was growing up and I used to share an attic room with my brothers,” she says.

“I always used to wet the bed,” she confesses - though is keen to stress this is when she was “quite young, not recently!”

“It was because I was frightened of going downstairs where the bathroom was, so it was much safer for me to wee in the bed.”

7. Her kids won’t let her get too big-headed

When they think she’s being slightly narcissistic, Jane’s children are quick to pull her up on it. They simply state, “Look at me everyone!” she says. “It’s quite good actually to have that said to you on a regular basis, because it reminds you that there are other people in the world who have their needs.”

8. A lie he told at the age of eight still haunts Rhys Ifans

“I remember the first lie I had to contain for a long period of time, and it was torture,” recalls the BAFTA-winning actor. “I must have been about eight years old, and I’d just moved to a new primary school. There were workbooks where you had to do sums and colour stuff in, and then you’d finish the book and put it away in the cupboard.”

But, on one occasion, he didn’t bother filling the last two pages before putting his book away. He knew that towards the end of term it would be brought back out and checked and he lived in fear of being found out for months: “I wouldn’t be able to sleep… it was the first kind of burden I’d ever had.”

9. The now 6' 2" actor was small as a child

Rhys reveals that, surprisingly, he wasn’t a tall child. “I was the smallest,” he says. “Then I had a big spurt, for want of a better phrase, when I was a teenager.” He remembers having pains in his legs during this growth spurt: “I could almost hear myself growing at night.” Rhys gained his height over just one summer: “I remember my mum bought us a new school uniform at the end of term and then it was too small for me by, you know, September.” He actually enjoyed being small: “I got a lot more attention and love, and I got away with more.'