SUSAN Hampshire was desperate to buy a bunch of miniature daffodils.

"In about five minutes I will be at the shop," she said, speaking into her hands-free mobile phone. She was driving to the theatre where she was performing Relative Values that night.

Whether the miniature daffodils were for her to brighten up her dressing room or for a gift, she didn't say, but I expect, Susan being Susan, it was the latter.

Susan plays the part of the Countess in the Noel Coward comedy of manners, who gets into a total panic and outrage when her son returns to his ancestral home with his Hollywood starlet fiance whose long lost sister was once a maid to the Countess's family.

"She's a woman protecting her turf. She's like any woman like a tiger protecting her cubs. She is trying to protect her unit. The play is deliciously incorrect. Funny in a way because it is so snobby. But she is likable because everything she does is not for herself, it is for someone else."

Susan, who shot to fame playing Fleur in the TV drama The Forsyte Saga in the Seventies and has won two Emmys, must still be one of the most hard working actresses in Britain.

The day she finishes her tour with Relative Values at Wycombe Swan she is taking a train to Inverness to start filming for seven months on the BBC drama series Monarch of the Glen.

"By the time I finish Monarch of the Glen, I would have worked for two years non-stop. Although I might have taken a few days off after Alan Ayckbourne's play last year," she says.

She relishes the fact that the parts are still rolling in.

"I am very lucky. There isn't enough work for us actresses. It is slightly easier as you get older, rather than when you are in your late 40s and 50s. It is difficult then, you are neither glamorous or a granny, but now I can definitely be a mother of grown up children. Which is lovely. Which is what I am."

Although Susan, who has a home in South Bucks, looks ten years younger than her 64 years she has no ambition to put her feet up and retire.

"I think you should work the years in which you can still make a living so that you have something to put aside. Pensions are evaporating before our eyes, any savings we have there's no interest on them, they are devaluing before us. I think the only responsible thing to do is to earn money to protect oneself, otherwise you become dependent on the state."

And she is quite enjoying her more mature years.

"I do like it. A lot of the things that you worried about when you were younger have been sorted out by the time you get older. When you are younger it is all your emotional problems. When you get older they are all sorted out."

And her English Rose features are still as vibrant as when she was younger.

"In the same way I am very responsible in work that I have something put aside for my old age, I am with myself. It is part of my job. Genetics plays a huge part what our parents looked like. We age the same way our parents did, so all my sisters and I are genetically lucky.

"I don't smoke. I drink a tremendous amount of water. I am careful with my diet, I don't eat junk food. I don't drink excessively, in a way I am taking care of myself. I think when you are fortunate enough to be working, your adrenaline is higher and that also makes you look better than if you were very unhappy."

She does go in for beauty treatments too.

"I have acupuncture for my face. And I do buy expensive creams but water is my best friend and the diet. I eat Brazil nuts and almonds for the skin and lots of green vegetables. And I eat at least two tins of sardines a week they are very good for the skin and the brain."

For a woman who is dyslexic she has five honorary degrees.

"I think the bottom line with an Honorary Doctorate is basically they rather hope that in some way you may contribute to that university financially. I didn't cotton on to it straight away," she laughs.

If she hadn't been dyslexic, would she have liked to have gone to university?

"I think my parents would have been thrilled. That's more my parents' thing than mine. I wanted to get on and do something."

She certainly did. She made her debut in Expresso Bongo in 1958. But it was the 70s that brought her fame with the Forsyte Saga, The Pallisers, Upstairs Downstairs, Vanity Fair and The First Churchills.

Filming Monarch of the Glen in Scotland does mean that she will be apart from her husband, impresario Sir Eddie Kulukundis.

"It does mean a lot of my salary is employing people to take care of him, not ideal, but it is through the athletic season and a lot of his time is taken up with him watching the athletics."

This year Susan and Eddie will be celebrating their 21st wedding anniversary.

So what attracted her to Eddie all those years ago?

"I had known him a long time before we started going out together. I had known him for many years just as a friend, I suppose that is a good way round to know someone as a friend and the whoosh you're married."

To celebrate their anniversary, Eddie is going to visit Susan on the set of Monarch of the Glen in Scotland.

"He comes home from America and then comes straight up to Scotland and will spend a couple of days with me. That is going to be good."

Relative Values is on at Wycombe Swan, March 25 to 30, call the box office 01494 512000