Miriam Margolyes on the day she was told off by Queen Elizabeth II

Actor Miriam Margolyes turned 83 in May and had a heart operation last year, but told our own Saga Magazine that she has no intention of slowing down.

“Being old is a nuisance,” she said in the July edition. “But I still have my energy, my stamina and my marbles.

“It’s really in the last few years that I’ve become well known. Every day I get offered a job – podcasts, TV series, reality shows and I think, why now?”

The BAFTA-winning actor, who appeared in the Harry Potter films and Call the Midwife series, is known for her trademark honesty and colourful language (she swore live on Radio 4’s Today programme in October 2022).

She says: “I am not a vile person, I am a pretty normal, ordinary person, but I am pretty blue. It’s what you do that matters, not what you say.”

On meeting the late Queen

But she revealed it was something she said that led to a telling off by Queen Elizabeth II.

When Margolyes was young she used to stick photos of the then Queen on her wall, and finally got to meet her at Buckingham Palace during British Book Week.

She remembers: “I went with two friends, we formed this little grinning semi-circle and she came over. She said, ‘What do you do?’ I said in a very silly way, ‘Oh, Your Majesty, I am the best reader of stories in the whole world.’

“She rolled her eyes to heaven, obviously thought this woman is barking and quickly moved to the person next to me.

“She asked him the same and he said he sold colourful books for dyslexic children. So, I turned to him and said, ‘How wonderful.’

Her Majesty, understandably piqued by this interruption, turned to me and said, ‘Be quiet!’.”