HOWZAT

Mortimer never actually met Sage, who died as the script was commissioned, but former students and family members told her the late literature teacher was “this incredibly exotic, brilliant, fierce creature who just inspired everyone she met”.

As the daughter of two writers, novelist-lawyer John Mortimer and Penelope Gollop, it was perhaps inevitable that Mortimer would eventually attempt to follow in her parents’ footsteps. She accepts that she risks unflattering comparisons with her famous father by pursuing her own literary sideline, but still speaks with enormous fondness of the man who always told her she was wonderful and beautiful from birth.

“He’s pathetically proud of his children,” she smiles. “We could fart and he’d think it’s the best thing that ever happened. I don’t feel like it’s a shadow in any way, other than sometimes when I’m writing. He is such a great person to have around that I don’t regret being his daughter for a second. Which is very good — it’s not something that I can do too much about. No, I’m very, very pleased with him.”

Acting obviously remains Mortimer’s day job for the immediate future. She will soon appear alongside Steve Martin in the new Pink Panther film and Woody Allen in the comedy auteur’s London-set comedy Match Point, with more high-profile roles to follow. But despite her struggles with Bad Blood, she remains determined to maintain the family literary tradition.

“I am writing another screenplay with my best friend,” she says. “God, I shouldn’t have said that! We’re waiting to get the rights for the book, a contemporary book, so I can’t really say what it is yet. But anyway, I am foolhardily writing another one.”

Another screenplay? On top of a full-time acting career and the guilty burden of motherhood? Perhaps Mortimer is simply a glutton for punishment. “Or maybe,” she says with a twinkle, “it’s all an effort not to be a Sloane from the Chilterns . . .”

Dear Frankie opens on January 28

SCREEN SCRIBBLERS — WHEN MOVIE STARS GET INKY

Renée Zellweger revealed this week that she’s leaving Hollywood to be an author, and hopes to write “fiction, non-fiction, whatever I’m feeling when I pick up the pen”.

Ethan Hawke has written two novels, The Hottest State and Ash Wednesday, the latter critically acclaimed.

Antony Sher The Shakespearean actor emerged as an aspiring novelist, with four under his belt: Middlepost, Indoor Boy, Cheap Lives and The Feast.

Carrie Fisher Postcards from the Edge (1987) was her successful literary debut. Since then “Princess Leia” has written three more novels.

Stephen Fry has written comic novels including The Liar and Hippopotamus.

Dirk Bogarde began to write his many novels and biographies in the late 1970s after retiring to France.

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