Who dares wins

Eight years later she became artistic director of the Roundhouse. This meant accepting funds from Robert Maxwell, a primary sponsor. "On our first meeting he told me, 'Miss Holt, I don't drink, I don't gamble, I don't sleep with women.' Well I believed the last.

"Look at him. You'd need a block and tackle ... it just wouldn't have been practical would it darling?" She brought Alan Ayckbourn's Scarborough company and the work of the Glasgow Citizens to the north London train shed, but perhaps her biggest success was in transporting the extraordinary Rustaveli Company from Georgia at the height of the Cold War.

When the Roundhouse closed, she transferred her skills to the National (in 1985) and had immense influence as head of touring. After a brief spell working as executive producer of Peter Hall's company, she set up her own in 1990.

Her talk refers passingly to stellar-productions: Peter Stein's The Hairy Ape and Ingmar Bergman's Miss Julie in the Eighties, the RSC's Electra with Fiona Shaw and Three Sisters with two Redgrave sisters and a niece in the 1990s, and now the West End run of the five plays from the RSC, which she admits were a risk. "Greg [Doran, RSC associate director and deviser of the series] invited me up to see them. 'You must come, Thelma. We so want to see you.'

'I knew exactly what he wanted. His fairy godmother blessed him with so much damn charm. We sat in his garden. He gave me tuna. He knows I like tuna. They're such tarts, these directors."

Had the RSC approached her first, she says, "I'd have told them, 'Bugger off.' But it was too late. I'd seen the plays. The audience was having such a ball. I was sunk. I said to Greg, I'll have to find a partner [old ally Bill Kenwright came to the rescue].

You don't need remedial arithmetic to know the difficulty of putting on a cast of 18 in five weird, unknown plays. And my weakness is this Napoleonic thing of where I am not, chaos is."

She is already hungry for her next projects. First, in March, is Pericles at the National with the Japanese Ninagawa Company, which she first brought to the South Bank in

1987. "I'll be there at the end of Trevor Nunn's regime. For sentimental reasons, that's good for me, especially since Ninagawa's directing, and Japanese theatre is my great passion. Nick [Hytner] seems to know what he wants, he's accessible. I'm sure he'll pull it off.

"In my dreams, I would like the National and the RSC to combine - to keep their autonomy, but to use each other's three theatres, build on each other's strengths. But now I'm being rational, darling. Can you imagine anything so straightforward happening?" After Pericles, in another coup, she will bring her old friend Ingmar Bergman to the Barbican to direct Ibsen's Ghosts. "He's now in his eighties, very alive and giving no quarter, dearie."

Theatre is Holt's life. She doesn't take holidays, except an occasional week "with the last wife of my much-married ex-father-in-law". She lives in a flat in Bayswater, yards from her first husband, the publisher Patrick Graucob, whom she married in her twenties.

In 1968 she married an American actor, Lawrence Pressman, having sweet-talked a rabbi into conducting the ceremony, somewhat illegitimately, in a synagogue. Here the story becomes entangled with yet another ceremony in Italy - "except I wasn't divorced at the time. I don't believe in divorce anyway. I'm a Catholic. One must sort out one's own deeds with God, in one's own way."

She attends mass and prays each night, "very briefly, not on my knees, to St Anthony of Padua. When I was a child I wanted to be a priest. Nice, showy profession, best frocks, most lines. The Latin sounds lovely. I've always liked foreign languages I don't understand." Not a vocation perhaps, but now fulfilled in one respect since the National's Pericles will be staged in Japanese.

The RSC's season of Jacobean plays in rep at the Gielgud Theatre (0870 8901105) until 22 March. All five plays can be seen together this weekend.