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.

‘Of course I am not as polished as they are and I haven’t their confidence. I couldn’t possibly, given where I came from.’ She talks about her ‘big mouth’ as if it is an external entity, quite beyond her control, and indeed sometimes it seems as if it is. One thinks of all that fuss when she let slip to a journalist that the Miami Vice heartthrob Colin Farrell, 42 years her junior, had made a pass at her. ‘I worried about how Colin would react to those awful headlines, but he came to the first night of Doubt in New York on Valentine’s Day last year and told me not to give it a second’s thought. He’s a darling boy. I went to a restaurant with him and women were virtually lying across tables asking for him, but you know, that Carly Simon song is very true when it says that “Legend’s only a lonely boy when he goes home alone”.