Meeting Eileen Atkins

24 March 2007

‘We formed, along with Miriam, another woman I had got to know through the disease, a self-help group and talked a lot on the telephone. When Linda knew that she was dying she stopped calling. She pretended that she was travelling. I suppose she had been concerned about the effect it might have had on my morale. It was typical of her. Then Miriam’s cancer came back last year.’

There is pain in Dame Eileen’s voice, but also fortitude. She says there are some aspects of her character that are very masculine. ‘I try to just get on with things, without a fuss. I certainly have a masculine approach to work in that I have always wanted to make my own way.’ I wonder if it extends to sex. ‘Oh yes, certainly. Old men can talk about how they find young women attractive, but old women are not supposed to even look at young men. But I have made no secret of the fact I love young men and love to be around them.’

At 22, she married the actor Julian Glover. He had an affair with Sarah Miles. By the time Eileen was 32, they had divorced, but she remains a friend to both her former husband and Miss Miles. Eileen has owned up, too, to a long-running affair with a well-known American who is now dead, but whom she has never named lest she embarrass his widow. ‘Infidelity,’ she says, ‘is one of the last things you should fall out with someone over.’ She adds that she is friends with all but two of her ex-lovers. How many have there been? She self-consciously tots them up. ‘Somewhere around 20,’ she says, finally. ‘Edward Fox was among them. He believed that a woman’s place is in the home. A job came up for me in America and he said to me that if I took it then we would be finished. I took it and we finished. It was six months before we talked again. I love him dearly.’

Since 1978 she has been happily married to the advertising director Bill Shepherd. ‘I warned him that my career was always going to come first and he accepted that. I am sure that’s why we’ve stayed together. I say the things I have that matter to me these days are my cats, my house and my husband, in that order.’

She laughs. One wonders if she has not finally found some degree of contentment in life. ‘I worry still about finding work. It’s not just that I love to act, but I do need the money. Everybody thinks I made a fortune out of coming up with the idea, with Jean Marsh, for Upstairs, Downstairs. In fact, I got a pittance for it. I think, though, that a part of me also rather enjoys the precariousness of an actor’s life. Maybe life has got to be a struggle to be real.’

Tim Walker is the Sunday Telegraph’s theatre critic and diary editor.