Vanessa Redgrave has rushed home to wash her hair and change into the elegant white kaftan that was a present from her daughter, Natasha. "Something I know I can put on when I am hoping not to look scruffy,'' she says, smoothing down its folds.

In her modest mansion block flat in west London, she has clipped blue hyacinth perfume rings on to her lamps to disguise the smell of her chemical-free cigarettes, poured a glass of water and set it on a tray next to a tiny, dolly-sized chair in the corner of her sitting room.

This is where I will perch, with a perfect view of her leather slippers, as she relaxes on a capacious sofa for the next hour, expounding on life, love, loneliness and her regret at not having more children.

Hey, I don't mind. I know my proper place in the food chain. And talking to Vanessa, with her shoebox face and pale possum eyes, is like meeting some mighty queen, some deity from another age who has deigned to move among the mortals for only a moment or so.

At the age of 68, she now reigns at the top of the mighty Redgrave acting clan, a tribe that includes brother Corin, sister Lynn, niece Jemma, daughters Joely and Natasha Richardson and, by proxy, Natasha's husband, Liam Neeson. Sir Michael Redgrave, the big daddy of them all, died in 1985.

She accedes that actors she works with are often scared of her and her family's awesome reputation, but she does what she can to put them at ease. ``People are sometimes frightened of me, true. But I just do all the things one would do for any human being to try to make them feel better. You don't mind if I smoke?'' It's more of an instruction than a question.

``Your water is behind you.''

Tonight, as the rush hour traffic roars past outside, there will be precious little discussion of Redgrave's work as a human rights campaigner or her political views, mostly because she does not like mixing this strand of her life - ``I am puritanical about it'' - with acting, although it's difficult to see how that works.

Our meeting was abruptly delayed by 24 hours because she wanted to make sure that this newspaper's journalists were not about to call a lightning strike - certainly news to us - and therefore inadvertently cause her to cross a picket line. Still, she doesn't really want to discuss this or anything else on her political agenda because she feels that, over the years, her views have been misrepresented, usually, let us be honest, as ``batty.''

``I never said that. That is what journalists are always telling me I have said. Of course, I am misrepresented very often, but so is everybody who has got something to say.''

We must, then, take it for granted that Redgrave's socialist, pro-Palestine, anti-Putin, humanitarian views remain undiminished, and we must love her for the fact that she cares not what anyone thinks, but enough to be a campaigner on both an international and local level. She holds residents' meetings in this very room, she led a campaign that successfully halted plans to knock down a nearby cinema and housing to make way for a superstore.

On all this, she wants to be discreet, although she admits to being cheered by the recent release of more Guantanamo Bay prisoners. ``From that concentration camp,'' she spits. Where does she find the energy?

Redgrave, who had cosmetic surgery on her ``eyebrows'' in 1995, but has since ``let everything go,'' works all the time, vacuuming up ``a lot of parts that other people can't play, apart from me and Maggie Smith and Judi Dench.''

Recently, she had to postpone her return, after a 43-year gap, to the Royal Shakespeare Company in a production of Euripides' Hecuba, due to a mystery operation, which she now reveals was to remove kidney stones.

``This brilliant technician gave me a scan and I said: `What's that strange thing there?' and he said, `Funnily enough, it is your kidney.' The technology is so wonderful that it's only a minor operation now. And I will be back in hospital this summer to have the first of my hip replacements. They can do only one at a time, you see.''

Although she seems cheerful enough, Redgrave admits to a strange moment of maternal sadness and longing when looking at the screen during her scan; she wished she was looking at her own new baby instead of her malfunctioning kidney. ``I would have liked to have more children,'' she says.

``I always wanted five children when I was younger. That was my dream, I wanted five and I don't think I would have been bothered if it had turned out to be six. In the end, I had four, but I lost one of them, the fourth one. I had a miscarriage.'' Her voice fades in the lamplit gloom.

``Ho, all's well that end's well,'' she says, eventually, ``and anyway, I've got lots of lovely grandchildren.''

She adds that once she considered the loss from a global perspective, she wasn't so sad about having only three children; the two girls by her former husband, the bisexual director Tony Richardson, and one son, Carlo, following an affair with Franco Nero, with whom she starred in Camelot in 1966.

``If I wanted to contribute in some tiny way to make the world better for my children and their children, I knew that I had to work.''

It was while she was filming Ken Russell's The Devils in 1970 that she miscarried her second child with Nero, and the relationship with him ended around the time she took up with actor Timothy Dalton, a year later. This romance began with a six-hour argument about the true meaning of the ``To be or not to be'' speech in Hamlet, and effectively ended when she went to a trade union rally in Manchester three years later, when he wanted her to stay with him. There were reconciliations, but Richardson, Nero and Dalton remain ``the only three men I have ever really loved.''

Redgrave will also be seen in the television series Nip/Tuck, alongside daughter Joely, who is one of the show's regular characters. The drama is centred on the work, life and play of two Miami plastic surgeons and catches perfectly the hollow, amoral world they operate in, both on and off the table.

Redgrave strides into view as Joely's therapist mother, demanding a facelift from her daughter's surgeon husband. ``You're just going to have to come to terms with the fact that your mother is a force of nature,'' she says, and a quivering Joely looks like she won't ever deny that. Later, the Redgrave character growls that ``beauty is power, and you lose both after 40,'' as she hops on to the operating table after groping one of the young medics. The following scenes, as long needles are pushed into her face and her skin is yanked over her forehead like pastry on a pie dish are not for the faint-hearted.

``Suffice to say, what you saw wasn't my own head,'' she says. And, after her own little dabble with the doctors, 10 years ago, Redgrave is happy to let nature take its course and says she has finally come to terms with the way she looks. ``I don't consider myself beautiful at all, I'm usually running around like a scruff.''

As a young girl, almost 1.8 meters tall, wearing thick spectacles and covered in boils, she dreamt of looking like her ``wonderful idol,'' Audrey Hepburn, but is pleased now that her parents did ``not have the money to chop me about - that would have been a terrible shame.''

And while she doesn't disapprove of Botox, she does not think it can be for the good of the human race. ``It is in human hands, after all.''

She has acted with Joely before, on the London stage, but this is the first time they have appeared together on television. Still, there are so many Redgraves running around it is not unusual for them to act together in cozy family productions. Lynn Redgrave, for example, has a role in the upcoming film Kinsey, opposite Liam Neeson.

It's nice. It's what Vanessa likes. ``Because it's not everyone who gets to act with a daughter or a father or a mother. And my experience is that it is a very nice experience. And Joely is superb, of course.''

Her home is calm and well-ordered, with the intelligent bookshelves and tasteful paintings that one might expect. A small electric piano sits in the middle of the room, testament to the songs she has to learn for her upcoming role as Hecuba, now scheduled to run at London's Albery Theatre at the end of March. The scent of blue hyacinths, her mother's favorite, continues to dominate the room.

Until her mother, the actress Rachel Kempson, died two years ago at the age of 92, they lived together. Now, Vanessa is alone. ``But I don't feel lonely,'' she says. ``I still feel my mother is here. I can smell the hyacinths. There is an oak tree and a cedar tree in the yard. There are robins and blackbirds and squirrels and Rachel loved them all. So I don't feel lonely at all.''

That's the way of the Redgraves. They stick together until the end.