'A kind of magic drug': Miriam Margolyes will tell you anything

Well, that's that then. We're two minutes into our interview, and she's already lived up to her saucy reputation.

The 83-year-old actor loves to get a rise out of her audience, and all the more so when she's on a tour to talk about herself and her own life.

The second volume of her memoir, Oh Miriam! (Hachette, $34.99), is every bit as profound and profane as the first, This Much Is True. Snippets from her early life in Oxford, the only child of Jewish parents, her love of theatre, first film roles, coming out as a lesbian, enthralling industry gossip and some shocking anecdotes - it's a rollicking read, and all the more striking when you consider the calibre of productions she's been involved in, the people she's worked with, the circles she's moved in.

Margolyes has always played up to her physical appearance, which is more twinkly nanna than titillating gossip, with her silver curls and naughty grin. She's also a character actor of considerable talent, able to slip into personas at the drop of a hat. Her live one-woman show, Dickens' Women, toured the UK and Australia more than a decade ago, and demonstrated not only her love of literature and accents, but also her deep appreciation of humanity in all its foibles.

And she certainly loves a good story, whether it's being pummelled onscreen by the staunch method actor Steve Martin, to one of her earliest sexual encounters as a student in Oxford with a random American soldier she met on the street.

But, as this second volume demonstrates, there's always more to know about someone's life, especially when it comes to answering questions from the public.

"They want to know what I'm really like, and I'm dying to tell them," she says.

"There are no questions that I won't answer. A lot of them are about sex. I mean, really, I can hardly remember what sex is, because I'm 83 and I'm not so interested in sex now. I'm more interested in money than sex.

"But, you know, I just answer whatever they want to know. And I don't prepare it. It's absolutely unvarnished truth sliding out of me."

If you've never had the pleasure of listening to Margolyes speak - outside of her vast trove of on-screen personas from Harry Potter to Romeo and Juliet, or even the popular ABC TV documentary series Miriam Margolyes: Almost Australia and Australia Unmasked - it can be discombobulating.

Her cut-glass accent, the result of growing up in Oxford, is often at odds with the words it produces. She's known as one of the first people to say "f---" on British television (she claims it was unintentional), and if you Google her, several compilations of her "most shocking TV moments" will pop up.

In reality, though, despite her regular guest slots on celebrity interview shows, her BAFTA (for Best Supporting Actress in Martin Scorsese's The Age of Innocence) and the fact she's an OBE who was once told by the Queen to "be quiet", she leads a quiet life with her long-term partner, a retired Australian professor of Indonesian studies.

It's mainly the memories of glitz she lives on, and thankfully, her own memory is as crystal clear as her accent.

"I mean, it's difficult for me to remember things that happened yesterday, that I'm not so good at," she says.

"But things that happened in my youth, and in the past, I can recall tremendously clearly. And I love that, because memory is identity. And if you lose your memory, you lose who you are."

There's nothing more important, she says, than understanding where you come from, and she wishes more people would take an interest in their own families' lives.

"We should write about relatives for people we remember," she says.

"Make them live again, in all their idiosyncrasies and show their fears and delights and their occasional cruelties and sometimes their wickedness. But it's important to bring them back to life.

"And it's going to make people use words better, because people forget how to use words. We're all using avatars and emoticons and all that bollocks."

Like many of her generation, modern life is often beyond her, like just the other day.

"I was in the middle of writing something, and suddenly a thing came up on my computer saying, 'Would you like to be an avatar or to have an avatar'?" she says.

"And I thought, 'F--- off! I didn't want an avatar. I'm me! Get off'!"

And indeed, she has always had a strong sense of herself, although, as she has recounted many times, she never told her father she was gay, and sincerely regrets telling her mother.

"She loathed the idea of my being a lesbian - that was absolutely the bloody end," she says.

So how did Miriam grow into such a determined and free-spirited creative, if she was so determined to meet her own mother's expectations?

"I think it was more than that. I mean, she wanted to mould me into the person that I think she had hoped she would be," she says.

"She wanted me to be an actress, which she had longed to be. She wanted me to be a wife and mother and somebody who was sought after in top circles. Well, I think I managed some of it.

"But every time I was successful in work, she gloried in it, she was thrilled. I did have the luck to make her happy, and I think that's what I always wanted to do. I wanted to make my parents proud of me.

"Now, whether they would be now I don't know, because I'm perhaps well-known for things they would not approve of. But on the other hand, when people talk about me, as they might do, they usually say nice things. They usually talk about that I'm kind and friendly and funny, and those are good things. So I hope that they would approve."

Margolyes' long-time partner, the practical and limelight-avoiding professor has been a source of stability and strength throughout her life - does she think her mother might have grown to love her, too?

"She might have done, because she was an immensely sensible woman," she says.

"I think she might have come round. You never know, do you, unless it happens. People can be very surprising people, as I've learned in my own life, you never know what's going to happen. You can't predict people, they can astonish you and amaze you and delight you and disgust you, and you never know which is going to present itself."

And this, she says, is why she loves to tour with her books and talk to people about their lives, as well as her own.

"I love connection with an audience - for me that is a kind of magic drug," she says.

"Everything fades, every problem fades away, and I just have fun and delight in it."