Miriam Margolyes opened up about her regrets as the actress admitted she is beginning to feel her age at 84. The veteran actress, who played Professor Sprout in the Harry Potter, spoke candidly about her health, including her plans to ask for assistance in dying if she required it. The on-screen star said she had "let her body down" and wished she had taken care of herself more in her younger years. Speaking in a new interview, Miriam revealed she hoped that when her time comes she would be beside her beloved partner Heather Sutherland in their residence in Italy.

Miriam has always been candid about her health over the years, and she admitted she will pursue assisted dying if she reaches a point where she is deteriorating in "pain and embarrassment". She also shared a devastating health update as the performer confessed she is now forced to use a walker. The actress, who is set to release her new memoir, told Daily Mail's Weekend Magazine: "I’ve let my body down. I haven’t taken care of it. I have to walk with a walker now. I wish I’d done exercise. It’s the most ghastly waste of time, except that it keeps you going. So, I’m foolish."

"I don’t want to go through a slowly diminishing period of pain and embarrassment," she explained.

"If a stroke meant I couldn’t speak, or I was doubly incontinent, or I lost my mind completely, I would ask to be put down. That’s because I want to be who I am. I don’t want to be less than I can be."

Miriam also opened up about her relationship with Australian professor, Heather, who have always maintained separate homes in London and Amsterdam and come together for holidays in Tuscany and New South Wales.

She shared: "We really do love each other."

Miriam described her other half as a "remarkable and brilliant woman" and said they should live together when they're old.

"Oh, I hope so. I hope I will be able to live with Heather in the house that we bought together in Italy in 1973 until we die," she added.

Last year, Miriam spoke more about her life after being diagnosed with spinal stenosis, which is a condition that puts pressure on the spinal cord.

"When I started kind of failing physically, I remember saying to directors and producers, please don’t show me clambering out of a car or climbing upstairs on my hands and knees,’ she previously told the Radio Times.