"My face has a good side and a bad side - or rather a confident side. I think it's to do with my hearing. I was born deaf in one ear and I've always liked to put my deaf ear to the camera and my hearing ear to the person I am talking to. I've been doing it that way round for so long that the good side of my face has learnt how to work the camera while the other side hasn't. It's not that I think one side is better to look at. It's purely a confidence thing.

God, I'm waiting for big fluffy hair to come back. My hair just hates this current flat thing. It doesn't do it politely. It likes to bush out huge. It just loved the Eighties but I can't let it do that now because it doesn't look modern. Worse, it looks as if I'm trying to hold on to the whole Dynasty thing [she played Sable Colby in the hit soap, and its spin-off The Colbys].

For fun, my sister and I had photos taken recently with bulldog-clips on the back of our necks pulling the skin tight. We thought it might be a better alternative than plastic surgery, but then my neck matches my hands and elbows and my feet and my face. And my brain. So what's the point?

I don't bother to look in the mirror too much because whatever's happening at 52 is happening. I don't think my darling grandson, Jude, who is two, is going to care how my face looks. He can't say Grandma, so he calls me Glamour and does it so sweetly without knowing the irony and wryness of it. That Grandma part of me doesn't give a tuppenny whatsit about ageing.

Then there's another bit of me that knows I look permanently grumpy now. People ask me all the time, 'What's the matter?' It's just my face. I was sitting in a hairdresser's recently - not one that I knew well - with silver foil on bits of my hair, and I caught a glimpse of this woman in the mirror and she looked so haughty and cross. Then I scratched my nose and I realised that she was me from an angle I wssn't used to. She frightened me.

If I could be absolutely certain that I would come out of plastic surgery looking like Catherine Deneuve, I'd do it. She's got herself another 20 years of good-looking face. But then you see such jolly bad ones too. There are inevitably going to be some people who cling on to what they were and some who realise that the past was glorious but that the future holds fabulous things. Anyway, sometimes the past isn't quite as glorious as you remember it. If I think back to making The Nightcomers [in 1971, opposite Marlon Brando], I was a very fluffy shape. I had a constant battle with fluffiness.

It's not at all that I want to devalue beauty. I've done a lot of judging at beauty pageants, like Miss World, because I feel strongly that boys have football and girls still have their looks. And when you're judging these contests it is their intelligence that is being challenged as well as everything else. They cease to be vaguely attractive if they're as thick as two planks.

I split my life now between here and the States. There, the lifestyle is so much healthier. Provided you have a perfectly healthy attitude to ageing, in the States it's not going to happen so stinking fast because you actually do some exercise. You eat better, so you look better. Here if we meet, we do it over a drink or a meal. There we meet up for a hike. In my professional life though, the truth is that you've practically got to be a foetus to get employed on TV. Definitely the contract is drawn up at that stage. All I can think and hope is that great grandparents will be needed for sick foetuses, so my career there might go on."

Stephanie Beacham is starring in 'Nobody's Perfect' at the Churchill Theatre, Bromley from 25 February to 2 March.