“There was a documentary on me once and they pieced together all the prostitutes I'd played,” she says.

“I've never seen a character falling out of a door going ‘Hello love, you going my way?’ I couldn't believe how many I'd played.”

But when she switched her talents to writing in the early 1980s, working on the script of Widows, she knew she had to do her research and not just rely on cliches.

“I actually went out to London's King Cross and searched out prostitutes to talk to,” she says.

“It wasn't easy, they thought I was joking. Not until I offered to pay for their time would they would sit with me in a horrible little cafe and then you find the truth, it’s dark and a far cry from what we all think.”

It was the character of Bella in Widows, a prostitute recruited as the getaway driver by the matriarch Dolly Rawlings, that la Plante first wrote. Bella came into the group of women, the widows, planning a heist that their husbands failed to pull off, last in the story but she was the first woman la Plante found.

“She just came to me easily, the first one, I had to dig around to find the others to fill out the story.”

La Plante was quite an established actress. She played Cordelia in King Lear, Hedda Gabler, Chekov, Strindberg, but she kept getting cast as a prostitute.

“I can’t remember the number of scripts I received covered in fingerprints because so many people had rejected them.”

She decided to write a script of her own. One about four women, who, after the death of their husbands, plan to pull off one last robbery in their memory. She even wrote a character called Lynda into the series.

“But when all the scripts were finished and the producer asked me what role I wanted to play I realised, and I hadn't even been aware of it, but I'd written myself out.

“I wasn't right for any part and you know I never returned to acting.”

Widows, a six-part series, aired between 1983 and 1985, at its peak it had 18 million viewers. La Plante morphed it into a novel in 1983. The second television series screened in 1985 and that book Widows’ Revenge is out now.

“I never thought the books would be the success they were worldwide,” la Plante says. And she didn't think the television series itself would take off the way it did. She had four virtually unknown actresses playing the widows, it was about a violent world, with complicated characters, it was full of emotion and was written by a woman.

“But people loved it,” she says.

One of those people was a young boy who would grow up to become an Academy Award winner for his film 12 Years a Slave. Steve McQueen was a teenager growing up in London when he first saw Widows.

“He was obsessed by the character of Bella,” la Plante says.

“He'd never seen a black actress on the television before, it's hard to believe that's what television was like in those days.”

McQueen co-wrote the 2018 Widows film with Gone Girl’s Gillian Flynn, la Plante was a consultant. The result, starring Viola Davis,  Michelle Rodriguez, Elizabeth Debicki and Cynthia Erivo, as the widows, also starred Colin Farrell, Liam Neeson and Australia’s Jackie Weaver.

La Plante believes the success of Widows, in all its forms, is that people connected with the women, for many different reasons. The were ordinary people, driven by love, grief, revenge, desire.

“There was something of them all in all of us,” she says.

“My aim was to put real people on the screen. We'd been very used to fictional gangsters so it was very exciting to look at these women.

“There was Dolly, a middle-aged mama figure, that got the fans. Young men couldn’t get enough of her, she couldn't get away from them.

“No one had seen that kind of woman on screen before. Not only was she tough but she was slightly coarse, but she also had immaculate taste and nobody had never seen those qualities grouped together.”

Widows' Revenge, by Lynda la Plante, Bonnier, $39.99.