I've got an overactive, analytical brain. I get frustrated, impatient, angry with myself. I swear at myself a lot.

People ask me how I manage without a man in the same tone they might ask someone how they're doing with just one lung, but it's not like that at all.

I grew up in the Fifties, and the majority of people in my class had fathers living at home. I was very aware that I was in the minority. I had a foreign name, and my daddy didn't come and pick me up from school. I felt like an outsider, which probably helped me as an actress.

At the beginning of my acting career, I worked for two seasons at the RSC and spent a lot of time in the Cotswolds exploring Shakespeare's countryside. It's my kind of English landscape, with its tiny villages and one-room thatched pubs.

Im mad keen on recycling because Im worried about the next generation and where all this waste were producing is going. It has to stop. I wash out my plastic containers and recycle envelopes, everything I possibly can.

I didn't get attached to Botox. It is costly, and you have to remember to keep doing it.

I ski every three years or so. I don't have the ingrained confidence that others do, but I'll happily toddle about a green or blue run.