Emily Mortimer suffers from “social anxiety”

She said: “I prefer having people over because I get social anxiety.

“My way of socialising is to cook – anything involving a lot of butter – so I don’t have to talk very much!”

Emily’s latest project is ‘The Pursuit of Love’, which she has directed and also appears, and she cast her best friend Dolly Wells in the show but the pair had little time to gossip on set.

Dolly laughed: “I had to be quite disciplined. I would have loved to be pulling her aside with, ‘I just have to talk to you about something.’”

Instead, after a day’s filming, Dolly, also 49, would visit her pal at the lodge on Gloucestershire’s Badminton Estate where she was staying with her family.

Emily recalled: “It was very domestic and blissful. We keep saying, ‘We’ll always have Badminton!’ ”

It was co-star Lily James – one of the few people in a cast that also included Emily’s mother and children that the actress-turned-director hadn’t worked with before – who suggested the ‘Match Point’ star took the reins on the production, and she’ll always be grateful for that support.

Emily said: “It was Lily James who suggested I direct it. She told producers she wanted a female director and that she thought I would be good… without her doing that, I don’t think anyone would have taken it at all seriously.”

And both Dolly and Emily think it was “really exciting” for an actress’

opinion to carry so much weight, though they admitted there are still inequality issues in the wake of the #MeToo movement.

Dolly said in a joint interview with Stella magazine: “For the person making that decision to be the leading lady as opposed to the leading man is really exciting.

“Having a woman sailing the ship means there’s already a precedent where inappropriate or non-consensual things are, I feel, much less likely to happen.”

Emily added: “I do think it’s getting so much better but it’s still there. When you talk to younger women who you assume everything has changed for, there’s still a confusion about how to be in charge of yourself and have your sexuality not define you, whereas for men it doesn’t define them.”