Diana Quick: I sometimes wish I’d had a facelift

She was once hailed as the most beautiful woman in the world. But these days actress Diana Quick admits she sometimes wishes she had undergone plastic surgery as a younger woman.

The 67-year-old star, who is best remembered for playing Lady Julia Flyte in the 1981 TV series Brideshead Revisited, says that when she looks in the mirror today, she no longer recognises the reflection.

“I had to go through some old pictures recently and was absolutely surprised by the changes on my face,” she said.

“It was like looking at someone else. I don’t think it’s ungracious to seek cosmetic help — it has crossed my mind from time to time and I have been tempted. But it’s too short-term. Once you start down that road, you have to keep going.

“They say you have to do it in your 40s to get the full benefit, so it’s far too late for me. In any case, I come from a family of surgeons and I think it should only be used as a last resort. Good looks are not something you earn. But as you get older how you look is a reflection of the life you have led.

“If you try to live as well as you can, then hopefully your face will reflect that. But it’s unfair that we put so much pressure on women to look good and then give them so much stick when they go under the knife to achieve this.”

For all her misgivings about the ageing process, Quick is still strikingly good-looking and possesses a fierce intellect — she won a place at Oxford University when she was 17. Her acting CV is equally formidable, including roles with the Royal Shakespeare Company as well in films such as The Duellists and Saving Grace.

But she is best known for her role in Brideshead alongside Jeremy Irons and Anthony Andrews. The hit ITV series cemented her place as one of the country’s leading actresses. It earned her a Bafta nomination and one magazine cover asked: “Is this the most beautiful woman in the world?”

While many ageing actresses complain about the lack of big screen roles for older women, Quick is always working. “That’s because I chose to become a character actor,” she explains. She combines her acting work with being director of the annual Aldeburgh Documentary Festival.

Quick is about to star in The Big Meal, a new play by Dan LeFranc and directed by Michael Boyd at the Ustinov Studio in Bath — a venue with which she has a longstanding working relationship. “It’s a touching play about love, marriage, raising children and the general onslaught of life in which you turn around and find that youth has vanished and taken with it a lot of your dearest-held assumptions about the way things would turn out,” she explains. The month-long run starts on March 6.

— Daily Mail