No luvvie lost between Glenda and Dirk

Glenda Jackson, the actress-turned-politician, and her fellow British screen star Dirk Bogarde, were not, perhaps, the close friends they once professed to be. In a letter to another friend, just published in a collection of his private correspondence, Bogarde described Jackson as "a plain girl, with feet like a goatherd, hands like a bricklayer, bad teeth." He did however concede that she had "an inner magnificence I have only seen matched by Edith Evans".

The MP for Hampstead and Highgate, and star of films such as Women in Love and A Touch of Class, declined to comment when pressed by the Daily Telegraph to react to her friend's disloyalty. But it might have been worse. In other missives contained in The Bogarde Letters, edited by his biographer John Coldstream, the actor called called Richard Attenborough "an idiot", Vanessa Redgrave “a ninny” and said that the late John Gielgud barely understood Shakespeare.