And if you're trying to find your way in the movie game, there would surely be nobody better to offer advice on the highs and lows of a competitive career than the legendary Bette Davis.

Which is how, back in the late 1970s, when he was a young actor making his name among the all-star cast of lavish Agatha Christie thriller Death on the Nile, Simon MacCorkindale found a friend in legendary Oscar-winner Bette Davis.

"She was extraordinary and it was a great privilege for me to work with her and to have been able to call her a friend, which was even more of a privilege," he says of a friendship which came to an end only with the celebrated actress's death in 1989.

"We saw each other contantly from the time we worked together until she died and I was very lucky to do that and I learnt an enormous amount from her – she took me slightly under her wing.

"I spoke to her for the last time probably about two months before she died. In fact I was due to see her but she wasn't well enough and said she didn't want me to see her like that."

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Davis did, of course, have the reputation of being one of the most outspoken of all the great hollywood legends, a woman not afarid to speak her mind – or to make enemies.

"I never saw the bad things," Simon insists. "Bette Davis is still an icon and she was that because she was so damned good and she didn't suffer fools gladly. As a young actress she never did and she didn't as she got older.

"I didn't personally find her cantankerous either. She was very supportive. When I was playing my last scene with Mia Farrow Bette came in, even though she wasn't working, and watched and after I finished she clapped!

"And one of the stories I delight in telling is from the first morning I met her in the hotel in Egypt, where we were filming.

"It was seven in the morning and I went down from make-up and found the only other person sitting in the lobby was Bette Davis, already made up and dressed, ready to go.

"I remember thinking that if Bette Davis, with all the work she had done, could still be first on set then I could learn a lot from that. You don't mess about – professionalism is everything!"

It's a philosopy that has taken Simon from the BBC dramas of his early career – he was a very young star of classic I Claudius – through movies and a Hollywood career that included everything from the strange adventure series Manimal to cult camp hit Dynasty, into producing and directing and then, more recently, back to British TV with his role as Harry Harper in Casualty, a part he has only recently quit.

"There has been a bit of a plan to it," he laughs. "But unfortunately, the problem with this business is however much you plan, there are no guarantees. You can be second in line for every part in the world but there are no prizes for coming second. It isn't like getting silver medal at the Olympics.

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