Your roots, your family, your friends all become so much more important to you as you get older, especially if you are a wandering minstrel like me.

Soaps are one of the few areas on TV that really embrace older women. In drama, there's this ridiculous invisibility for women between the ages of 40 and 60. Unless you're old enough to play a grandmother, there just aren't the roles.

I don't like posh hotels. I like small, eclectic hotels, and luxury for me would mean really good company with good food in a really funky, beautiful house in the middle of a field where someone came and serviced the place for us.

My preferred environment is by the sea or somewhere rural. I don't want to be in a city, I don't want to visit New York and I don't want to go shopping.

Its either feast or famine, and thats the way its been for as long as I can remember. Ive spent my whole career thinking Ill never work again. Every actor lives with that insecurity. You just have to negotiate the rapids as they come.

Of course, like any woman, I look in the mirror and think, 'Oh, wouldn't I look better with a bit of Botox?' But you've got to find comfort in your own skin. I've watched women stretch themselves year after year until their faces are no longer recognisable.

I loved living in Hollywood - and the weather there was just fantastic - but there is something about rural England, and especially Suffolk and Norfolk, that pulls at my heartstrings.