In my home, money was not channelled into investments, bonds or banking. It was employed, rather, in finding ways of giving us happiness. Maybe mother remembered the days in the concentration camp where she didn't have enough to eat, because we always had plenty of food at home. "You never know who'll drop by without warning," she said. And this was just the sort of thing that usually happened.

Every time I think of my childhood in that house, I remember lots of people, most of them unexpected guests for lunch or dinner. People of different professions and nationalities. Everyone was welcome. They didn't have much money, but it was enough to make everybody happy.

Although I became an actress years later, almost by chance, I'd been in touch with the theatre ever since I was very small. In England it's usual for children to do pantomimes for fun or to entertain their friends. And this was something the little Frankenbergs did very often.

We were still almost babies when we discovered the pleasure of dressing up and stepping into someone else's shoes. It was my sister Anne who wanted to become an actress. Sally wanted to get married and have children (she's the only unmarried one of the sisters). And I wanted to be a ballerina. All three of us loved to act and our 'theatre group' was always at the ready. Since we almost always had a foreign girl staying with us at home, or a neighbour or the child of some friend, we could stage any play we wanted. It was easy for us to get six people together and that was great.

My father, who loved to write stories, gave us his 'unpublished' plays for us to act. He often filmed them with his Super 8 camera. I especially remember one of our plays. When we were very small, my father had to undergo a very delicate stomach operation. While he waited for surgery in his hospital bed, he wrote a pantomime for us. Now that I'm an adult, I can see what went through the head of a loving father who wondered whether he would see his children again.

At any rate, when he finished it, he gave it to us to rehearse. We did it as professionally as we could at our tender ages and we carefully chose all the outfits we needed. `Papa is ill,' we thought, `and this will be our get-well present.' Of course we didn't know how very ill he was.

We managed to get the hospital staff to allow us to perform the play by his bed, a day before the operation. I remember to this day the expression of happiness on my father's face as he watched his three daughters act out his play. Someone filmed the whole thing and today I still have it as one of my most cherished treasures.

Luckily for all of us, my father recovered from the operation and in the years that followed we were able to perform many of the plays he wrote. These have been dusted and updated for my own children. And that same old smile appears on their grandad's face whenever they stage them.

Some people don't have too clear an idea about their future, and sometimes they end up doing a job which happened to come their way by chance, because of the circumstances of life. Others decide very early on what they want to be. I belong to the latter category.

I sometimes wonder how I could have had such clear ideas at such an early age. I always knew that I wanted to be a ballerina, but there was a very special moment when I realised I would indeed be a ballerina. My parents tried to make us three cultured little girls. We always had books at hand but, aside from this, they started taking us to the theatre as soon as we became `young ladies'. And as soon as they could they took us to Covent Garden. It was my first visit. They were staging Aida and it wasn't the usual thing because Amy Shuard, a great family friend, was singing in it.

When the show ended, we were taken to congratulate `Aunt Amy'. Her dressing room was spacious and Amy was carefully wiping off the last traces of make-up. The robes she wore during the opera were lying on a chair. And it was at that precise instant when I thought, 'I want to be a ballerina.' It was then I felt the need to be myself and many other people at the same time.