Judi Dench and Kate Winslet, who play Iris old and young in the film, and are both fine personalities in their own right, have each successfully become someone quite different from themselves. I immediately recognised Iris in Judi Dench, just as I recognised what Iris used to be, more than 40 years ago, in the performance of Kate Winslet. But in neither case was I disturbed by the resemblance, or by a feeling that somebody quite new and unfamiliar was being created by the actresses on film.

As for myself, Jim Broadbent and Hugh Bonneville, the actors who were playing me, old and young, gave me quite a turn at first, but I soon got used to it. They were not me, of course, but I enjoyed seeing how they set about being me, so to speak, and found myself admiring the way they did it. I am rather short and they are both conspicuously tall men; also they have hair, whereas I am now, and was then, practically bald. But this seemed to make no difference, and I felt a rather absurd vanity in seeing how cleverly they had picked up, by means of recordings and photographs, tricks of speech and behaviour which I was myself hardly conscious of possessing. (Judi Dench, who had never met Iris, was equally brilliant at intuiting how she looked when she was ill.) Watching an actor playing oneself tickles the ego. It also made me feel that I could be, or become, quite a different person, if I wanted to...

Iris has been transformed, and very successfully transformed, into art - into art which I could enjoy as if I were almost a detached spectator, without feeling the pangs and the sorrows, the joys too, which are the daily accompaniment of remembering the woman I lived with for so long. Watching the film was not primarily an emotional experience, but an aesthetic one. "How well they have done us," I thought. Not "how weird and even threatening it feels to see oneself and one's loved one walking and talking on film."