At 85, the actor has lived through much political upheaval. But, she writes, today’s hostile times feel like ‘the worst yet’. She reflects on her journey from teenage Tory to full-throated leftist – and says there’s still time to save the nation from the bad guys

A funny thing happened on the way to 2026: I got old and the world turned nasty. It happened very quickly and it’s to do with politics (the world) and pelvic floor weakness (mine). It’s strange being this old. Sometimes when I look in the mirror, it’s a shock to see wrinkles and grey hair, because inside I am still that naughty Oxford High School girl, risking detention just for the joy of entertaining her friends. People assume that with great age comes great wisdom, but actually we remain who we have always been, only more so, and we need to make our peace with that and with each other.

The Britain I grew up in, though – that feels almost unrecognisable, and everyone I speak to says the same thing. The historian Eric Hobsbawm, whom I knew and loved, argued that people invent the past they want for their own purposes – that the real past was quite different: “Today is the great age of historical mythology.” He’s right, but that past is still the safe haven I’d like to return to. People feel adrift, they don’t understand or feel a connection to the place they thought they knew.

The 1990s love tragedy starring a young Leonardo DiCaprio and Claire Danes is a tonic and a delight

Thirty years ago, Baz Luhrmann reinvented Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet as a gangbanger love tragedy of the present day, with Mexico City standing in for an imaginary urban place called Verona Beach. The result was a terrific success, more of a success, I suspect, than Luhrmann ever had again; it was irreverent and questioning in just the right way, a sunburst of energy, but instinctively respectful to the story, with Luhrmann cutting the original text with co-screenwriter Craig Pearce but not changing or modernising it. It is full of life, extravagantly joyful, then passionately sad, and its lurid 90s crime-chic design doesn’t look dated. And in this Romeo and Juliet, Luhrmann never suspended the forward momentum to indulge campy musical setpieces, perhaps because Shakespeare’s language is the music and the dance; the text keeps the interpretation grounded.

The 21-year-old Leonardo DiCaprio, yet to have his massive breakthrough in Titanic (another story of starcrossed lovers), plays young Romeo Montague, whose family is locked into an unexplained Sicilian-style blood feud with the Capulet family. Romeo is a young idler and would-be poet, scribbling lines of verse into a notebook, and at this stage dreamily moping over a young woman called Rosaline, whose silent offstage existence is the play’s minor incidental mystery. (Brian Dennehy and Christina Pickles play his parents and they have much less of a role than the elder Capulets.)

Lee Knight says accolade for A Friend of Dorothy, based on friendship with neighbour, sends message to never give up

A writer-director from Stanmore in Middlesex whose short film has been nominated for an Oscar has said he feels “utterly overwhelmed” by the accolade.

Lee Knight’s film A Friend of Dorothy, starring Miriam Margolyes and Stephen Fry, is in the running for best live action short.