Quotes

[on deciding on her second career as a writer] I was lucky that I had a good career and was able to support myself and was in a couple of hits. Then when Glenda Jackson turned 50 she said she wasn't going to sit around and wait to be offered the part of someone's wife or mother, she was going to become an MP, I nearly fainted. I thought, I don't want that to happen to me either.

[on her writing career] I went in rather blindly, thinking it was easy. When I started working on The Actresses people kept telling me I couldn't write a book about middle-aged women because who would publish it? I put all my bile and anger about what happens to older actresses into that book. But actually I don't feel bitter myself and I do still work as an actress, although I don't get offered much.

[on her role in Dracula Has Risen from the Grave (1968)] I was somewhat snooty about it at the time, and I remember distinctly that the big Hammer Horror bosses were snooty also: I was rather thin and wispy, not big and brassy which is what they wanted. But the director Freddie Francis, and the producer Aida Young just laughed: they taught me how to stuff a bra with cotton wool and found a big red wig and Zena the barmaid appeared - I do not know to this day whether the bosses thought I had been replaced, or realised it was still me.

[on her 2020 memoirs] I had vowed always never to write any personal account concerning my life, although I had been asked to do so. But as I say in the book: while I was packing up all my diaries and journals to burn them I made the mistake of looking at some of the very earliest ones. And realised that I was so old that I was looking at 'historical documents'.