"I think I was born to be middle-aged"

The actress is happy in her work – she currently stars in Trevor Nunn’s production of Noël Coward’s Relative Values – and even happier at home, a smallholding in rural Devon where she lives with second husband Sam Farmer and her two children – Emily, 13, William, nine – and a variety of chickens, sheep and pigs.

The hectic years of her early career – the launchpad role of Dorothy in hit 1990s sitcom Men Behaving Badly, the high-profile marriage to comic Paul Merton – have given way to a steady stream of TV work (Kiss Me Kate, Jonathan Creek, Life Begins) and she now enjoys a comfortable existence making TV travel documentaries (“They asked me and I thought, why not?”) appearing in sitcoms and dramas (most recently, she was Deirdre in Dancing On The Edge) and, as now, appearing in the odd theatre role when it tickles her fancy. At 52 she feels she is where she always wanted to be.

“I think I was born to be middle-aged,” she remarks.

A large part of this happiness is down to Farmer, who she met in 1999, a year after her divorce from Merton.

The couple actually met in Sussex, she tells me.

“It was on the crazy golf course in Worthing. He was working as a runner when we were filming the last series of Men Behaving Badly. It was slashing down with rain. So romantic!”

Farmer asked her out on a date four days later, in front of her co-stars Martin Clunes and Neil Morrissey: “Incredibly brave!” No one was more surprised than she when the couple fell in love and went on to marry in 2006.

At 41, Farmer is more than ten years her junior and Quentin was only recently out of her first marriage when they met. “But I think I made a good choice,” she says. “It’s working out well and I still think he’s the best man who ever lived.”

While she is away working, it’s Farmer who stays at home to look after the children.

Emily is already showing signs of becoming a talented musician while to Quentin’s horror, her son William seems to have inherited his mum’s knack for comedy.

“I see him watching comics on the telly and I just think, oh no. I wouldn’t worry about him becoming an actor, it’s the comics you want to worry about!”

While theirs is a vaguely unconventional set-up, it works for them, she says.

“I doubt my own career would be possible without Sam. I know when I’m away that my children couldn’t be in better hands.”

But she admits she misses them all – even the chickens – when she is away. “Wherever I am, my mind is always on home and I have to talk to Sam and the kids on the phone. I’m happier there, more at peace and more settled. I love my work – acting’s what I do – but being away from my family is a big downside.”

She’s been away a fair bit recently. Aside from the usual commitments of shooting TV, there have been trips to India, Cornwall and the UK’s National Parks for various travel documentaries. “I’m of a generation that didn’t really have family holidays abroad and I didn’t start my travelling life until I was well into adulthood.

I wish I’d started earlier. It’s been great to see a bit of the world and take the audience with me.”

India, in particular, had a lasting effect on her. “I found out about lots of different religions, I rode camels and I met surrogate mothers who carry babies for people in the West,” she says. “I feel really changed by the experience. I’m not very well-travelled so at the age of 50 suddenly to experience such a fascinating place was just amazing.”

She doesn’t often appear in theatre these days but says Trevor Nunn made her “an offer she couldn’t refuse” in persuading her to do Relative Values alongside comedian Rory Bremner (making his stage debut) and Miranda star Patricia Hodge. “But also it’s a great play and I thought, d’you know, I could really enjoy myself showing off in this. Although it’s set in the 1950s, as a satire on class and the British attitude towards it, it’s still very relevant today.

I don’t think the issue has gone away, whatever we might like to think. Look at our current Government – not many of them from the local comp.”

Even after all this time, Quentin still suffers terribly from stage fright and fully anticipates being sick before she goes out on stage for Relative Values.

“It’s very frightening, especially when you go on stage for the first few times in a new play when you don’t know if you know it well enough, whether it will be good, whether the audience will like you, if you’ll collapse with fear…”

While many actresses complain of work drying up as they get older, Quentin is in demand – and has been for much of her career. So I’m intrigued by a comment she made in a national newspaper when she claimed to regret “most of” her work. “I could name on one hand the things that I think are OK; the rest of it is just rubbish and embarrassing,”

she is reported to have said.

“Oh no! I was just joking,” she says now. “I don’t really spend any time thinking about what I’ve done or whether it was good or bad.

Who views their life like that?

If they do, they need to get out more.”

If she isn’t one for regrets, she also isn’t one for looking too far forward either. “I have no idea where I might be in ten years’ time; I don’t even know what I’ll be eating for dinner tonight.”

When the present is as sunny as Quentin’s, who can blame her?

*Relative Values is at Theatre Royal Brighton from Monday, July 1, to Saturday, July 6.

Tickets from £16.90, call 0844 8717650.

Photos