Kathie Lee Gifford asked: Was that overwhelming at the time? Daunting?

"Oh, no, I was far too young and naive and stupid. I thought it was the way films were…great to be part of it. I knew that I might fail but I thought, 'I'm just going to get in there and do my best.' Katherine Hepburn was fantastic. I never forget my first day's work on the movie. I was about 19 or 20 years old and very nervous. My first scene was facing her and Peter O'Toole and all their family…being introduced and they worked all day photographing them. And I was hoping they'd get to me and they didn't. At the end of the day they said, 'Okay, we'll do Tim tomorrow. We'll turn the cameras around. Katherine, you have the day off.' She only had one line to me. You know, that lady said, 'But I talk to Tim in the scene. I am coming in tomorrow morning.' And she came in, sixty-one years old. A great star. There was no room for her to sit. She had to squeeze her way through the lighting stands and she got herself to [Timothy mimics Ms Hepburn crouching] just to be there for me, and she said something like, 'Hi, I'm Eleanor. If things had worked out differently, I might have been your mother.' That was the only line she had. It was not only professional, it was a woman who cared about a young, scared kid doing his first movie." (Timothy Dalton)

"When I was twenty-one I did The Lion in Winter and I was living in a bedsit in Clapham. You know, the only decoration I had on the walls were 1960-something colored shirts that I'd stuck on the wall because I didn't have a wardrobe and I had to use, what do you call it, the picture rail to hang the shirts on. And then I was in this bedsit and all of a sudden this terrific Rolls Royce with a flag on the front of it turns up to take me to the airport to fly me to New York for the premiere of Lion in Winter. And there I am in a hotel suite on Central Park, whopping around in limousines, and so for about five days and then I'm back in a bedsit in Clapham. That for me at the age of about twenty-one was one of the best experiences you can ever have. There is reality and there is fantasy, and reality is where we all live." (Timothy Dalton to Kathy McGowan, 1989)

...Exhilarating as this piece of news must have been at the lime, it was still subject to rubber-stamping by Hepburn. After completing the tests, all personally supervised by O'Toole, the would-be cast was summoned to the private upper room of a restaurant in Charlotte Street to meet Hepburn, Tony describes what happened: "We could hear her coming up the stairs and I particularly remember Peter being very nervous in a boyish, excited sort of way because it was in a sense his 'team' he was having to present to her. I suppose I expected someone like Joan Crawford. In came this woman wearing a khaki jungle outfit and forage cap, as if she'd just come off The African Queen. Much smaller than I imagined, 'What's your name?" she asked me. 'Tony Hopkins.' 'I've just seen your test. I guess you'll do.' Moving on round the room she said, 'You're Timothy Dalton? Yeah, you look good, I think you're going to be OK,' and so on. Eventually we sat down to lunch and were all dumbstruck - apart from Peter, who was fairly boisterous - by this extraordinary presence."

...Having films and TV already to her credit, Jane Merrow was easily the best-known of the young cast to date: "I had never heard of Tony at that time but they were very excited about him - heir apparent to Olivier and Burton, and all that. "Very early on I got the feeling that he was the one who was special although, interestingly enough, when we actually started filming, the only one who had a long-term contract discussed with him was Tim Dalton, because Tim had much more the film-star image. Tim, however, at that time, was terribly young and terribly aware of how gorgeous he was and the other guys - Tony in particular - used to tease him unmercifully..."