As Brits, we love a do, don't we? I adore our national celebrations. If I see a gold coach, you almost need to put me in a straitjacket, I get so excited.

I never mind scrubbing floors, vacuuming or bending and carrying stuff. Each time I do it I think, this is instead of going to the gym.

I was once kissed on the lips by a giraffe, and I don't think I've ever got over it.

I have a toy giraffe on my bed. I've got photographs over my desk as well as a mask of a giraffe in my kitchen. I am totally hooked.

I'm very good at getting up in the morning - so much of my life has been spent on film sets where we start at the crack of dawn.

It's so important to keep a marriage alive with small treats and doing little things for each other. Just remembering to say nice things and to have listening time is vital. That ghastly phrase 'quality time' means taking three minutes to sit down and be still with someone rather than yelling over your shoulder as you rush out.

A lot of us are ruled by fear during our lives - afraid we'll get burgled, afraid a dog will bite us, afraid we'll get fat, afraid someone will leave us. Once you lose fear, life becomes sweeter, and that happens as you get older. I'm sure by the time I'm 80, I'll be able to do absolutely anything!

You can't be vain as an actor. In 'Ab Fab,' we were made up as old women with bald wigs and jowly necks, and we looked fantastic.

I've got lots of good friends. I could have affairs. I can read a book all night, put the cat on the end of the bed. I can pick up my passport and go to France. I don't have to ask anybody.

It's an incredibly difficult thing to bring a giraffe down. They can kill a lion with a single blow from their feet.

If your family loves you, you're fine. What you can't grow up without is love.

I've never been interested enough to have a career trajectory. I've never had any ambition or thought of what I should be doing or had any idea of what I'd like to do. Never. And still don't. And if something comes along, I say 'Fine.'

I admire politicians. It is a really tough assignment, and I would fall at the first fence.

I could never go into politics, because I'm far too impatient and I'd want to be a dictator, albeit a benevolent one... I would hope.

I cut my hair myself and colour it. I know everybody in the hairdressing business despairs of me, but it's so much easier to do it yourself.

I'd been a Bond girl and in Dracula films and 'Coronation Street,' but I was always hunting for work. After 'The New Avengers,' I never had to wait for work again.

I don't do girlfriendy sort of things, like shopping or going to spas. Spas fill me with horror. Frankly, I'd be more interested in doing a walk through the sewers of London!

I've been dealing with the press for 45 years. You need a very long spoon to sup with them. While you are always grateful, they are like badly trained dogs. They smile and wag and bite your arm off.

I'm not terribly good at three-page recipes - I tend to skip bits - or anything that involves marinating things in juniper berries.

In petrol stations on the motorways where people have left the place looking messy, I clear up each lavatory I happen to have occupied. When people drop paper on the ground, and everything like that, I pick it up, put it in the lavatory, and make that room look nice.

I think most of the world would like to be Scottish. All the Americans who come here never look for English blood or Welsh, only for Scottish and Irish. It's understandable. The Scots effectively created the face of the modern world: the railways, the bridges, the tunnels.

I have never felt the constraints of social acceptability.

All you have to be is kind. That's all you need. Once you've got that, it virtually rules out everything else.

In Kenya you've got the great birds and monkeys leaping through the trees overhead. It's a chance to remember what the world is really like.

You have to feel more involved than just writing out a cheque. Charity is almost the wrong word - I think people are beginning to feel more responsible for the world.

Oh, I'm not beautiful. I can look beautiful; I can put beauty on. When I'm tired, I look bloody awful. I think I'm turning into the actress from 'Dynasty,' Linda Evans.

I think laptops should be banned from schools. Until you can prove you can add up on your fingers or think independently in your head, you have learnt nothing.

We've forgotten to respect clothes and consider who made them and where the material came from. We've been encouraged to buy things and, if we don't like them, bin them. When I grew up, we'd repair things or alter them.

I never wanted to go to university: books seemed to have all the answers, and the questions, too. I went to work for Jean Muir as her in-house model. Miss Muir - as she will always be to me - was interested in everything.

The press have given me affairs I've never had and killed a few I did have. After a while, you learn.

I'm boiling about the rainforests being chopped down to make disposable chopsticks. I'm boiling about the fact that we have palm oil put into every single one of our substances.

Though I was a mother at 21, being a grandmother makes the whole thing absolutely normal and gorgeous. The relief, the joy of being a grandmother is wonderful.

I'm aware of my body.

I've never felt the constraints of social acceptability.

I find it a great antidote... lipstick and mirrors and hairspray.

I would do anything to keep looking the job. I think you make an extra effort if you're on show.

If you're an enthusiast and you love the world like I do, it comes naturally. But I think charity must become more fun to give, more interactive and imaginative.

We transported eight giraffes, and there are now nine because one gave birth to a male shortly afterwards. They carry their pregnancies very well-they all looked the same.

I can't see any difference in having your hair dyed, your teeth fixed, your nose done, or your face smoothed out or lifted.

When you're young, you think life is forever, but it's finite. I'm 68, so even by the maddest measurements, I'm in the last bit of life.

All the trouble you will cause by not leaving a will. All the heartache! Family feuds are going to happen anyway, so be as clear as you can. And even if it's only to leave it to the cat's home, make a will.

Learn from nature. Stuff lives and stuff dies all the time, you know. Animals and birds and flowers. Trees come and go, and we come and go. That's it. So we should all seize life and make the most of what we have while we can.

As soon as you reach a certain age, you're thrown onto a kind of mental scrap heap.

There's an appetite for vigour in films. The camera loves a bit of movement. Movement is usually attached to younger people and men, and that's just the way it is. I think that it's a bitter pill to swallow, but it's a fact that there aren't going to be masses and masses of roles for older women because there isn't the audience for it.

The maddening thing is as actors of either sex, we get better as we get older, and so when you are 65, you think, 'I could play Juliet now. I understand it.'

I used to go out wearing any old rubbish, no make-up, nothing, but since mobile phones, that has all had to stop. People do come up to you so often and say hello, or want a photograph, and I just can't do it anymore in what I used to wear. They don't want to be seen hanging off a rabid old granny any more than I do.

I always knew that good stuff would come along when I was older. So when I was 18, I longed to be 30; when I was 30, I longed to be 50. I've always looked forward to my next birthday.

Cameras love pretty girls and craggy, old character men more than they can take craggy, old character women. But that's what's always happened. Work out how you can fit into it, and make that work. There are never going to be millions of parts for older actresses because there never were.

I cut the labels out of my clothes because they scratch. Clothes are just little workhorses, aren't they?

If you haven't understood that if you are born you die, you scarcely deserve to be able to be alive.