Sheila remembered she had spent the most happiest days of her childhood in her Auntie Bill and Uncle Roy’s minuscule flat on the Rue d’Amsterdam. But every page of Sheila Hancock's new memoir shimmers with laughter, defiance and profound insights into life as an old RAGE pensioner ― Mail on Sunday --This text refers to the hardcover edition.

There are references to the aches and pains of aging, falls and other illnesses, but above all this is the journal of a woman fiercely engaged with life. She also worries, in the book’s opening pages, that she is undeserving of the damehood she was awarded in 2021. Biography: Sheila Hancock, one of Britain's most highly regarded and popular actors, received a Damehood for services to drama and charity in 2021.Old Rage” is in no way a metaphorical title: this is a brutally honest and fiercely funny book by a lady who has pretty much seen it all, and may yet have some life left in her.

I felt Old Rage was a gift from the universe, given its positivity, despite Hancock’s righteous rage about various aspects of life. Old Rage by Sheila Hancock was a funny and excellent book and still looking great at OMG 89 years old and still got her wits about her. And then we join her through COVID; what it was like being told that you are extremely vulnerable and then being forced to live in isolation. Sheila Hancock, one of Britain's most highly regarded and popular actors, received a Damehood for services to drama and charity in 2021. At Rada, where Hancock trained to be an actor, she and Shani Wallis (best known for playing Nancy in the 1968 film of Oliver!As a Quaker one might expect a less judgmental and more forgiving soul than Shelia Hancock portrays herself to be. An excellent book which is good therapy if you need a good rant along with some interesting stories and anecdotes about her past and present.

I liked the diary style of the book and her feisty approach to the huge challenges of the pandemic for an older person with health issues living alone. At first I was a little unsettled by the format - it is loose and fluid like a conversation which switches backwards and forwards between dates and ideas.Suilven and spoke my heart “I did not feel diminished, a tiny human in the vast world, I felt part of it. She has strong opinions and is not afraid to express them but I share many of them so the book appealed to me. At Lisson Grove market [near Paddington], the traders are all [she slips into cockney] ‘Allo, Sheila! Its pages would, she hoped, describe fulfilment and contentment as well as how best to keep your aching back straight (believe me when I tell you that her spine would induce awe in even the sternest pilates teacher).

Whilst I’m sure she’s a very nice lady to be commended for her many and varied accomplishments including mountain climbing aged 83, raising 3 daughters whilst maintaining a career and a marriage to an alcoholic but the incessant opinionated ranting and disparaging remarks about public figures she doesn’t approve of or like is tiresome. For actors, however, retirement is rarely on the cards: most want (and need) to keep working, and Hancock is no exception.It was the best thing for her that he left, because she went to university and became a very reputable scholar. I was probably scared, disappointed it was considered a flop; feeling I hadn’t done good service to it because I’d suffered terrible stage fright. Funny, feisty, honest, she makes for brilliant company as she talks about her life as a daughter, a sister, a mother, a widow, an actor, a friend and looks at a world so different from the wartime world of her childhood. Her proudest achievement is still the RSC tour she directed in the early 80s – Roger Allam played Mercutio to Daniel Day-Lewis’s Romeo – but she has no sense at all of a trajectory, nor even of much success. Sheila doesn’t mince words in giving her opinions on the state of world and national affairs, while at the same time coping with advancing age (which doesn’t please her either).