I feel now like a hinge between generations, which is strange. It just happened recently. I think it's because my daughter is so much like me at her age. I feel like I'm reliving my own mother's experience of raising me.

It was - it's always very nice to be somebody rather grand.

Little girls, I am in the business of putting old heads on young shoulders, and all my pupils are the crème de la crème. Give me a girl at an impressionable age and she is mine for life.

I am just surprised to be doing anything at my age actually. When you think of where I am now and where I've come from, I am very pleased and very grateful to be standing up and delivering Julian's great lines.

A lot of writing about being a mother is not so much writing about the kids themselves. They become placeholders for the shift that happens when you're suddenly in charge of other people.

There was nobody in the family who had ever done anything like that before. My brothers - I had two brothers. They were twins. They both became architects. They were both six years older.

I don't think films about elderly people have been made very much.