My parents were very volatile but very loving. My father would get jealous if my mother looked at somebody. I used to be insanely jealous. It comes out of insecurity. It can come and go, but you get to the point in life where you don't have this raging jealousy and protectiveness about your world.

I do still get the odd fan letter about The Good Life, clearly written by somebody aged 18, who says: Will you send a photograph? And I think: Maybe it's kinder not to. I'm deeply into my 50s now.

I don't think, until you've actually lost somebody you really love, that you can go through that door that allows you to be grown-up.

So many roles for women demand that you make the audience fall in love with you or sympathise with you.

As we have more women in power, so the plays and the TV dramas are reflecting what's happening.

Every time we moved on, I joined a different class in a different school with different girls until, aged 13, my father had taken the decision to pull me out of school altogether. Everything I needed, he reasoned, could be found within the rich language of Shakespeare's plays at which, by then, I was something of an old hand.

It was in India that I started my acting career, courtesy of my parents, long before I set foot on stage in England. They headed a company of travelling players performing Shakespeare up and down the land.