Sian Phillips: My mother warned marriage wouldn’t suit me. She was right

As could perhaps be predicted from the actress famous for playing the terrifying Roman empress Livia in the BBC’s adaptation of I, Claudius and Smiley’s unfaithful wife in Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, Sian Phillips does not like making feelgood stories. “You know,” she says from her flat in the Barbican in the City of London, “you usually think, ‘Yes, that’s very nice — but life isn’t like that.’ ”

She made an exception, however, when she joined the cast of the newly released movie Dream Horse. She plays Maureen, the elder stateswoman of a syndicate in a run-down Welsh valley town that buys a racehorse. “This is a true feelgood story so I couldn’t be more enamoured of it,” she says. It is