Eileen Atkins: 'It's great being paid to have so much fun'

It is impossible not to warm to Dame Eileen Atkins or her persuasive line of chat. She is nothing at all like, say, Miss Deborah Jenkyns, the gloriously prissy spinster whom she played in Cranford, winning a Bafta in the process.

“Miss Deborah was so uptight she couldn’t eat an orange, not just in public but even in the privacy of her own room. Though she appeared stern, I found her hilarious, and I was terribly sad they killed her off in series one.

“During series two, they had a life-size cardboard cut-out of me that they wheeled around the set,” she continues. “In return, I sent the cast a crate of good-luck oranges with the message, ‘No sucking in public, please!’”

Gales of laughter now from Atkins, who had more fun on Cranford than any job, ever, thanks, she says, to the company of Britain’s un-Botoxed best, including Dame Judi Dench, Julia McKenzie and Imelda Staunton.

“At one point Judi, who played Deborah’s sister Miss Matty, and I were crammed into a tight space waiting to make our entrance in a scene and Judi whispered urgently to me, ‘Come on, tell me… Have you had anything done?!’ And I said, ‘Judi, if I’d had anything done... would I look like this? Come off it.’

“We laughed so much that Jim Carter [who played Captain Brown], who was passing by, said, ‘Where else would you find two women in their seventies laughing all morning and being paid for the privilege?’ And he was right, of course.”

After all, it is not often that dramas in praise of older women get an airing on British TV. Not often, either, that you find yourself in the company of so many formidable actresses all in one sitting. “Past a certain age [Atkins is 77], no one in the rehearsal room looks at women as sexual beings any more, and that can be a relief, too. It was great just to be with a bunch of ace actresses who all had so much in common.”

She has been enjoying herself too, mind you, this summer in Cornwall, where she has been working on the hugely popular series Doc Martin. She joins the cast as the curmudgeonly medic’s equally cranky Aunt Ruth. “All the humour here comes from the total abruptness that they share, the fact they can barely even speak to each other.

“When I was offered the part, I’d never seen the show. So my husband, Bill [Shepherd, a producer], and I thought we’d watch a couple of episodes to get a flavour – and ended up watching two box sets, back to back. The stories feel very real, and, while it’s very funny, there are no cheap laughs at all. The humour never descends into situation comedy; it just arises very naturally from these wonderful, quirky characters.”

Surprising as it might seem for an actress who has spent much of her career on stage performing the highbrow works of, say, Strindberg or Ibsen, nothing depresses her more, she says, than a part entirely devoid of laughs.

Recently, for example, she was offered the role of a befuddled 86 year-old. “They said there was no one else who could play her, and I suppose it was a compliment because, paradoxically, you have to be pretty fit to play a woman who falls out of her chair countless times during a play.

“I appreciated the offer, but the biggest thing for me, at this stage in my career, is to say that I really don’t want to play the infirm or the addled. I don’t want to play dementia or someone who is lying in bed wetting themselves. I know that for some people it’s a real story, but it would depress me too much. I notice, too, that, with a few very good exceptions, it’s normally women who get Alzheimer’s in dramas. And I kind of object to that on principle.”

She feels strongly, too, about women who go under the surgeon’s knife in a desperate bid to keep their looks and jobs. Anne Robinson? I suggest.

“Oh yes, she’s had far too much done, and she was such a nice woman. But I can see she’s been pressured into it just like so many other women in the public eye.”

Perhaps she hasn’t felt the pressure herself, she says, because she was never a great beauty. “My looks were good enough for what I needed in every possible way but not so much to be a burden. I have never been able to bear ­people who are obsessed with beauty. Those are the women who p--- me off more than anything else, especially when they call themselves actresses.

“One of the things I love about Helena Bonham Carter is that she is ravishing, but she does as much as she can to play it down and look funny. She doesn’t let her looks get in the way. I hugely respect that.”

Atkins’s conversation is peppered with the names of other famous people. She has stories about dinner parties where the guest list has included Lauren Bacall and Richard Burton. She is close to Vanessa Redgrave and Judi Dench. She even used to live downstairs from Anton Mosimann, who is catering a party thrown by Elton John that she is due to attend.

Atkins was raised in Edmonton, north London, the daughter of a barmaid and a gas-meter reader. Thanks to an inspirational teacher, she ended up at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama and has had work ever since.

So consuming was her career that she has never regretted not having children. “After my first husband [the actor Julian Glover], I was in a series of relationships, none of them stable enough to have a child in. Then with Bill, my second husband, I suppose it was too late.”

At the age of 61, she was diagnosed with breast cancer – in the same week as Linda McCartney. “Linda and I had a mutual friend, who put us in touch. We talked a lot on the phone, and it was a tremendous help to us. Sadly, Linda went very quickly, but she made them keep it from me that she was dying: she thought it might bring me down too much. She was kind and thoughtful to the end.

“Losing friends is the worst thing about getting older. I’m losing one friend at the moment in a particularly brutal way, and it does make me think that I must make a living will. I don’t want anyone to preserve my life beyond a reasonable limit.”

She stared the possibility of death in the face when the cancer was diagnosed. “Even then I thought, ‘I’m 61 and I’ve had a bloody good life.’ ”

Her seventies kicked off auspiciously with The Colin Farrell Incident. Famously, while they were working together on a movie, the then 28-year-old actor spent two and half hours in a hotel room trying to talk her into bed.

“Amazingly, I kept quiet about the whole thing for a year. A whole year – can you believe it? Then, on Loose Women, I talked about a handsome leading man who’d tried to bed me, never thinking people would put two and two together.

“I was absolutely mortified that I’d embarrassed Colin. But he was a total gentleman about it. I heard he was going on the Jonathan Ross show, and I felt absolutely sick because I knew Jonathan would do his utmost to get him to say something that would get a laugh at my expense. But Colin was completely gallant and described me as ‘The One That Got Away’. Really, I have nothing but wonderful things to say about Colin.

“His attempt to get me into bed uplifted me for a very long time,” she grins. “It helped me step quite lightly into my seventies.”

* Dame Eileen Atkins joins the cast of ‘Doc Martin’ on ITV1 from September 19