Laura LeVernier, we're taking our usual summer break so until we're back on air we're showcasing

a few programs from our back at log. As usual the music's been shortened for right reasons.

This week's guest is the actress Liz Smith. She was cast away in 2008 by Kirstie Young.

My cast away this week is the actress Liz Smith. As Nana in the Royal family she portrayed the

vagaries of old age with acute comic timing and poignancy. Indeed the part was a fitting career

defining performance for someone who's specialised in playing a long line of idiosyncratic old bats.

Her success has been a triumph of talent and perseverance over circumstance.

She didn't make it as an actress until she was 50 and her early family life was plagued with

loss, abandonment and sorrow. Now 86, her characters have a habit of dying on screen it is, she says,

an occupational hazard. Even so acting and making people laugh has always been a way of escaping

the often harsh realities of her life and she isn't planning to retire anytime soon.

So Liz Smith let's start if you don't mind with your screen deaths. We had letty

cropply in the Vickard of Dibbley and Nana in the Royal family. You are in essence.

You're at that stage in your career but you're also a method actor. I work for years with Charles

Maravita. So how difficult is it to play yourself dying on screen if you're a method actor?

It must be quite a traumatic process. Well it is but then it's been a long life and

you kind of see it coming. You won best actress recently at the British

Comedy Awards for your final performance of Nana. It was utterly captivating if I may say so

that performance. It was an intriguing mixture of the highs and the lows and the the

mundanity that can survive. It was a simply wonderful script by Caroline Ahan.

It was just brilliant. I was very very fortunate to have a script as good as that.

She mixes sadness with humor in a way that no one else can. Now you won a British Comedy

...