Meeting Eileen Atkins

Dame Eileen Atkins is adamant that she is a horrible person. ‘My mother looked at me as if she had hatched a snake, but then I could be vile to her and to my family,’ the actress says. ‘My parents were angry people, frustrated with their lot in life, and I inherited their anger. I’ve always put my career before everyone and I have been very selfish. I think it’s a good thing I never had any children as I would almost certainly have passed on my anger to them. I’d have been a terrible mother.’

Everybody seems to love and revere Dame Eileen except, alas, Dame Eileen herself. I tell her the complimentary things that the distinguished playwright Ronald Harwood has told me about her and she just laughs. She has always been different from her fellow dames — Judi Dench, Maggie Smith and Helen Mirren — but then she says that, coming from a council estate in north London, she had a background that was a lot more humble than any of theirs.