Zoe Wanamaker bemoans shortage of TV roles for older women

Actor Zoe Wanamaker has said that older women are still not getting enough decent screen roles. The star of My Family, 64, is set to appear in her sixth Poirot episode as a crime writer who occasionally helps the detective. But she told the Radio Times this week: "It's difficult to get work as I age, but it was always thus. Even Shakespeare stopped writing about women while his men aged. The young look nicer, but older women are more interesting with more to offer and better stories to tell."

She added: "It's similar in politics: there aren't many women because they find the fighting a bit galling and give up.

"It's a man's club and that must be difficult. I hope it will change because women's voices are very important and they are - sweeping generalisation - better at judging people as human beings."

Wanamaker played Susan Harper in 11 series of My Family, but said that she did not enjoy the fame that the BBC1 sitcom brought. "The first scripts were very good; some of the later ones weren't, but that's inevitable when they're being bashed out on the hoof," she said. "It was popular because a husband and wife married for 25 years still wanted sex. That's healthy, something to be optimistic about."

But she added: "People would nudge and point. I didn't go into acting for fame, and I have a love-hate relationship with it.

"I enjoy people being nice and it makes me feel good if they say I've moved them or made them laugh, but they can be inadvertently rude - 'You look so much better off the telly than on'."

Wanamaker, who married actor Gawn Grainger when she was 45, said: "Society has changed so much in the last 30 years. People get dumped through texts. It's tough. Relationships are to do with respect, and we need to get back to that."

"I'm concerned for the next generation – 16 to 24-year-olds – it's just been announced we're 22nd out of 24 western countries in literacy."

Wanamaker said she was angry that her father, Sam Wanamaker, who spent years developing Shakespeare's Globe theatre, was kept alive before he died of cancer at the age of 74; it would have been kinder if he had been relieved of his suffering, she said. "You come across people who find that abhorrent, and the medical profession is scared. Don't start me! I support Dignity in Dying, which says you should be allowed to die in the way you want, and others shouldn't be put in prison for helping you," she said.

"It's important to keep fighting for that right. We no longer have religion, which is why I get upset. If you don't agree with voluntary euthanasia, do you base your views on God? If so, which God? I may have my God, but I don't have to have yours."