“An A Room with a View and again we laughed and shrieked so much we quite unnerved Merchant and Ivory, I think, both of them [producers of the film] who were really, really appalled.
“Tea With Mussolini, again we just laughed, we played Scrabble, we drank prosecco and behaved very badly again.
“In fact, we startled all the Italian crew, they thought we were more peculiar than the people we were playing in the film. In fact, I know they did.”
Dame Maggie went on to say how ‘honoured’ she was to be friends with Dame Judi.
The pair have since been in another film together, Nothing Like a Dame, a documentary which saw them along with Dame Joan Plowright and Dame Eileen Atkins talk about their long careers and friendship.
source: express.co.uk