Princess Margaret’s grand car-boot sale at Christie’s last month reminded me of my own souvenir of PM. Several years ago I had decided to collect silver boxes, and a mutual friend asked if I would be interested in a couple belonging to her. ‘She’s having a clear-out,’ the friend explained, ‘Wants to get rid of
Los Angeles When I boarded the plane for Los Angeles in New York last Friday to attend the Vanity Fair Oscar party, as well as several others, the beautiful Uma Thurman was just ahead of me, looking every inch the star (she is, after all, 6ft tall) even though she was sans maquillage. She sweetly
An actor’s life is either feast or famine. For 90 per cent of us too often it’s famine, as our thespian business is vastly overpopulated and competition is fierce. In the past months I’ve had more than five jobs, including a two-week stint on Footballers’ Wives, which, after almost a year of famine, felt like
I was asked, in January, if I would have dinner with the winner of a raffle in aid of the Conservative party. I gladly agreed. Months later Percy and I turned up a polite 20 minutes late at the Drones Club, only to find a near-empty room. The only people there were two Labour MPs
A halcyon yet chilly afternoon in our house in the south of France, strolling around the garden trying to understand the gardener’s explanation for why he had ferociously slaughtered so many plants, shrubs and bushes that seemed perfectly healthy to us. Suddenly, we heard a piteous mewing from a bush outside the kitchen. The gardener
Las Vegas is America’s major playground, and the two days we spent there recently proved that. It’s a 24–7 town, unbelievably glamorous and exciting if you ignore the massively upholstered ‘middle’ Americans clad in uniform jeans and Tees who clutter the streets, then sit for hours hunched sadly over dollar slot-machines. What a mug’s game
I broke my toe in Minneapolis. This is far from the glamorous image of leaving my heart in San Francisco and infinitely more painful. I stubbed it on a faux Chippendale dining-room table leg during a breakfast meeting at the hotel. It was a hot autumn morning and the traffic on the freeway was gently
I feel I’ve certainly seen England from every angle in the past three months while touring in Full Circle, and it has surprised me how gorgeous the English countryside still is, and how hideous the infrastructure of some of our cities can be. In France and Italy, most towns have some sort of cohesion in
I’ve always considered myself a working actress and like about 98 per cent of my fellow thespians spend a great deal of time ‘resting’ involuntarily. It therefore irks when great swaths of the media refer to actors disparagingly as ‘luvvies’ and represent us as parasites and people who love swanning around and dressing up. I’ve
I was as excited as a kid going to Disneyland to be invited on Concorde’s last flight from New York to London. I’ve always regarded it as one of Britain’s greatest ambassadors, and we considered that being a part of its final journey was too important a historic event to miss. Percy and I thus
I was sad to hear about the death of Bob Hope, although hitting 100 is a fabulous record – almost like batting 1,000. I worked with Bob several times on his television variety shows and once in a movie, Road to Hong Kong. In the four previous Road films with Bing Crosby, Dorothy Lamour had
Channel 4 outdid itself in ignorance with the dumb, grandiosely titled The 100 Greatest Film Stars of All Time. We tuned in eagerly, expecting to see a cross-section of legendary stars from the 1920s to the present day in fabulous movie clips, and what did we get? Several dozen ‘talking heads’ purporting to be movie