You once said that you have no maternal instincts whatsoever, which I thought was interesting considering that your mother once dangled you out of a window in an effort to stop your crying.
A little bit of a Michael Jackson. I was a baby, so I don’t really know, but my mother said to me: “At one point I almost threw you out the window. I held you out there thinking, If I drop her, maybe she’ll shut up.” Many mothers would be very sympathetic to that. I don’t think she particularly wanted to be a mother. I think she adored my father, I think she loved sex and it was in the days of no birth control. And the direct result of loving sex is very often having children. She did everything that was required, but I think she would have liked a little more freedom.

Did your mother tell you how much she enjoyed sex with your father?
Indirectly, she did, yeah.

You must have had a very candid relationship with her, considering that you also brought her to the set of “Caligula” on a day when an orgy scene was being shot.
No, it wasn’t in the orgy scene. But you know, when we were doing “Caligula,” it was very rare that anybody had any clothes on. My mum was just great — she’d just sit there surrounded by all these naked extras or people wearing just little wisps of something or other and just chat away with everyone. That was a great quality my mum had.

In your new movie, “The Debt,” you very convincingly play a retired Mossad agent. Before immigrating to England, your grandfather was a czarist colonel from a noble Russian family. What are the chances you’re a secret Jew, as Madeleine Albright discovered late in life?
I wouldn’t be surprised. But if I am, I doubt very much that it’s on my Russian side, which is quite defined. It would more likely be on my English side. My mum came from the working-class East End of London, where the Jewish immigrants began their journey in English society. I’ve always thought I might have either some Jewish or some Gypsy, one or the other.

Have there been any moments when you thought — Oh, I feel very Jewish.
My love of sparkle. I don’t think that’s particularly Jewish or Gypsy, but I do have a certain love of sparkle.

You were taught by nuns in a restrictive convent school. Do you think this has anything to do with the fact that you became known as “the Sex Queen of Stratford” when you started acting onstage?
I don’t know. I think that was created independently of what I was doing. It wasn’t something that I created or that came from my behavior. I was just a really hard-working, dedicated young Shakespearean actress.

But the director Trevor Nunn said for your Royal Shakespeare Company audition you wore a garment constructed of black string with more spaces between it than it covered.
That was a product of his imagination. I didn’t own anything like that. I had one shapeless black dress. Maybe I wore that.

You did once say that you loved cocaine.
I haven’t touched it for 20 years, and I gave it up for a very good reason, which is that it’s not what it does to you; it’s what it does to other people. The people who grow the coca leaves are brutalized and murdered, and that’s the issue you forget when you’re having a lovely time at a party.

Let me admit something: when I first saw “The Cook, the Thief, His Wife and Her Lover,” I wondered if I was a deviant because I found the scene in which you and your lover are locked in the back of a truck surrounded by rotting meat quite sexy.
Yes, you are definitely a deviant. Nobody has ever told me that before. It’s not an attractive or sexy sort of film at all, actually.

I’ve got to say, despite your reputation as something of a free spirit who likes to have a good time, I’ve been finding you unexpectedly frightening.
Be afraid. Be very, very afraid. For a start, I’m not a party animal. I see myself as rather boring, a rather straight-arrow kind of person who wanted to be free, and I’m constantly searching to liberate myself from my own insecurities and my own uptightness. I think a lot of my work has been a weird attempt to liberate myself, but it’s not altogether successful. That’s my dichotomy.