She particularly appreciates, though, the instant reaction you get from a theatre audience that you don't enjoy with any other medium.

"You certainly know whether you are hitting it or not," she declares. "The audience will tell you and there is a strong potency about it.

"But that's not to say I don't enjoy film, television and radio very much, because I do.

"The answer, I think, is that you like whatever you do as long as you can get on with the script.

"If you really like it, then that's the beginning and end of it all for me. If it's not on the page, you can't invent it,"

She agrees that nowadays she selects parts with care, explaining, "I would rather not work for a year than take something for which I have no feeling."

And that caution has served her well, gaining her rewarding roles such as Margaret Thatcher in the television film The Falklands Play and, last year, the newspaper tycoon's wife in Maxwell for BBC-TV.

Central role

And in 2000 she won an Olivier Award for best supporting actress for her performance in the production of Money at the National.

Now she's at Chichester Festival Theatre playing the central role of Annie in the stage version of the hit movie Calendar Girls.

And, again, her recognition of a good script has worked for her, although initially, she admits, she started reading it out of duty.

But when she finished she put it down thinking, "This is wonderful. Theatrical magic!"

It was the idea of the film scripter Tim Firth that the story of WI members creating a nude calendar to raise money for charity should be made into a play.

"Being a man of the theatre himself, he always felt it would work even better on the stage than on film," Patricia told me.

"It is about a group of people and in the theatre you can experience the group instead of cutaway shots all the time."

We were seated in the foyer of the Oaklands Park venue, where Calendar Girls is having its world premiere before embarking on a national tour.

And, by coincidence, we were on the precise spot where in 1980 the cast of the revue-style musical The Mitford Girls came together for the first time.

Shining moment

In that production, which moved on to the West End in 1981, Patricia was portraying Nancy Mitford and she regards it as one of the shining moments in her career.

"I remember it with such affection because it was a wonderful experience," she recalls. "On the very first day we all assembled here where we are sitting now to start rehearsals.

"We all bonded together so beautifully. It was a wonderful summer, bathed in sunlight, and every performance was an event.

"The parallels with this production now are amazing," said Patricia, revealing that she had started reading the Calendar Girls script with huge misgivings.

"It was not what I wanted to do," she confessed. "I was on my way to something else in the West End. But I was attracted to it because I found the script so wonderful."

Like the film, the play is based on real-life events and people.

Patricia's character loses her husband to leukaemia and that becomes the reason for the calendar project.

"So it's actually Annie's story," Patricia says. "It's her loss and grief that leads towards the outcome."

An impressive team has been lined up for this production, including Lynda Bellingham, Sian Phillips, Elaine C. Smith, Brigit Forsyth and Gaynor Faye.

"It's a great cast," Patricia declares. "I have worked with Sian before - we did A Little Night Music together at the National 11 years ago - and I have known Lynda forever which is a help because it's all about the friendship of the two women.

Wonderful enterprise

"We are all working together tremendously well. This is a group who know the whole is much more important than the single individual."

Patricia is dismissive of the nudity aspect, claiming it involves only two brief moments. "There's no problem about it," she says. "It's all about what you don't see. It's the wittiness of the covering up."

Her last appearance at Chichester was a Sunday night concert eight years ago with Sheridan Morley and American cabaret star Steve Ross. Previously she worked at the theatre in 1983 in As You Like It during Patrick Garland's regime as artistic director. "Over the years they have very sweetly asked me to come back but it always has to work out with what is happening in your life," she explains.

"But I absolutely love this theatre. I think it's a wonderful enterprise and it has such a sense of occasion about it. It is a festival theatre" - she emphasises the word 'festival' - "and I think it's this event status that I love.

"It's a big auditorium so you can't undersell it. It has to be high impact stuff and I love that challenge. This theatre really has great presence and it's particularly thrilling to have it in wonderful hands at the moment (artistic director Jonathan Church and executive director Alan Finch)."

I put it to her that Calendar Girls was a fairly intimate story. Could it work well in such a big open space?

"It's difficult," she admitted. "I can't pretend, particularly with this play, which is designed for the proscenium arch - it has to be because that's where its future belongs - so there are difficulties here that are hard to overcome.

"And not all of which we can overcome. There are some sight lines which will never be right. While loving this stage, I do think it works well for epic theatre where to be robust is an advantage. It's difficult to do the intimate quiet scenes because you have still got to bang it out."

In her career Patricia has jumped from theatre to film to television to radio. "I have done a lot of everything, and deliberately. But if I have felt I have been too long out of the theatre, I have made a point of going back regularly.

"The strange thing is that in the last two or three years I have done more theatre than anything else but that's because the best roles have been there.

Lifelong quest

"Theatre is my first love, of course. That's where you improve yourself. I'm not interested really in going on working unless I do improve myself. I think it's a lifelong quest. You never get to the end of it and that's what interests me about it.

"I like the process of acting and funnily enough I think there are a number of people who don't. There are very good actors and performers but that's not what interests them. I like unpicking the knitting all the time and finding different ways. So I suppose I have sought variety."

That quest took Patricia into the movies, a journey that was highlighted in 1983 by a leading role with Ben Kingsley and Jeremy Irons in the screen version of Betrayal. This was the last film of legendary producer Sam Spiegel and it brought Patricia worldwide fame.

"Harold Pinter's script was exquisite, a piece of poetry," she recalls. "I was working with two wonderful actors (Kingsley had just completed Gandhi) and a magnificent director, David Jones. Sam Spiegel was a tricky individual but he was also lovely and it was a great privilege to work for him."

She went to Hollywood for three months to make Sunset (1987) with Bruce Willis, James Garner and a host of top-flight actors, under the direction of Blake Edwards.

Sadly, the film was not a success. She remembers, "It was at the time Bruce Willis was just emerging from television films and was on a three picture deal with Tri-Star. He had made one romantic comedy with Kim Basinger and Sunset was his second film.

"The story was about famous silent screen star Tom Mix who asked the real-life Wyatt Earp to come into the film he was making. I did some scenes with Bruce and it was great working for Blake.

"But people didn't know what to make of it at trial showings, what genre it was. And then they cut it a lot and at the end of the day it didn't quite make sense."

Her TV assignments have included a long-ish stint as Portia in Rumpole of the Bailey (1978-90), The Naked Civil Servant (1975) opposite John Hurt, Jemima Shore Investigates (1983) and Spymaker: The Secret Life of Ian Fleming (1989).

As far as live theatre is concerned, she took over from Frances de la Tour in last year's West End revival of the comedy Boeing Boeing, possibly on the advice of one of her offspring (she has two sons).

There are a number of musicals on her CV including Pal Joey, The Beggars Opera, Lady In The Dark and Noel And Gertie, in which she portrayed the legendary Gertrude Lawrence.

She rarely tours, has done so just twice in the last 14 years and will only do it prior to a West End run. Seven years ago she was in Noises Off at the National and then accompanied the play on a tour. But when asked to continue with the production to the West End she declined.

"I had done it for six months and my children needed me at home," she decided wisely.

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