I was so out of control I made the Queen snap! MIRIAM MARGOLYES' very candid ...

Hilariously candid British actress Miriam Margolyes — best known as Professor Sprout in the Harry Potter films — has been dazzling us with her outrageous new memoir. 

Yesterday, in our second exclusive extract, she snapped back at Monty Python stars John Cleese and Graham Chapman, who made her Cambridge days a misery. 

Now, in our final instalment, she recalls a joyous childhood, coming to terms with her sexuality — and a right royal dressing-down...

When the invitation arrived to attend the annual reception for British Book Week at Buckingham Palace, I was thrilled.

Smiling equerries opened the taxi door and we stepped out, to be guided to the very large reception hall where hundreds of people thronged and buzzed. I knew that the Queen, along with other members of the Royal Family, was expected to mingle and I felt this might be my opportunity to fulfil a dream.

As a child growing up in Oxford, I had a little 'den' just outside the kitchen, and I decorated it with pictures of the Queen from floor to ceiling.

I remember on June 2, 1953, standing at my bedroom window and saying: 'This is Coronation Day and you must remember this all your life.' And I have.

Over the years I've played various queens, including her great-great-grandmother Victoria more than once. But that was the nearest I got until that evening.

The crowd in the hall was huge and noisy, but I teamed up with a man I'd been introduced to, a president of the Association of Scottish Booksellers, and together we hunted down the Queen.

An equerry had advised us to form a semi-circle and smile, and if she saw us smiling in her direction she would approach and talk to us. This worked and, unbelievably, Her Majesty, looking exactly like the Queen with a helmet of iron-grey hair and her handbag clamped like a grenade to her elbow, was standing in front of me.

'And what do you do?' she said.

That was where I made my first mistake: meeting the royals does tend to make people daft. Instead of saying, like any normal person, 'Your Majesty, I am an actress who records audio books', I took a deep breath and replied: 'Your Majesty, I am the best reader of stories in the whole world!'

Her Majesty looked at me wearily, rolled her eyes heavenwards, sighed and turned away to my Scottish friend.

'And what do you do?'

'Your Majesty, I'm an academic trying to help dyslexic children to read. We've discovered that if the letters on the page are printed in different colours, it helps the children to absorb the information more easily.'

Listening beside him, I couldn't help joining in.

'How fascinating!' I said. 'My goodness, I didn't know that.'

Her Majesty turned back to me and said sharply: 'Be quiet!' The 't' of 'quiet' was especially crisp.

Everyone looked down, trying to contain their embarrassment at my gaffe. Undeterred, I spoke again: 'I'm so sorry, Your Majesty, I got carried away with excitement.'

The Queen rolled her eyes — again — and started talking about how that morning she had visited a London school and been fascinated by the way English literature was taught there. I was keen to respond so, once more, ignoring the royal request for my silence, I blurted: 'But, you see, Your Majesty, we are so lucky to be born English and to have English as our first language. Imagine, for example, Your Majesty, if we had been born . . .' I paused, looking for a country that didn't boast much of a literature, and came up with ' . . . Albanian!'

Well, that was altogether too much for the Queen. I supposed it smacked of the political.

Alarm crossed her face and she moved away, anxious to put some distance between herself and this clearly crazed woman. Clutching the handbag even more closely and murmuring 'Yes, yes' to herself, she disappeared into the throng.

In 2002 another thick, creamy-white envelope, embossed with the royal insignia, was delivered, announcing that I had been awarded an OBE for services to drama. A lot of people were quite surprised, none more so than me.

Some people think that because of my socialist views, I shouldn't have accepted my OBE. Of course, I shouldn't have. I know that. It goes against everything I believe in — but I most certainly wasn't going to turn it down.

As the Queen was observing mourning for her mother, who had just died, it was Prince Charles who pinned on my gong at Buckingham Palace.

'Oh, I am so delighted to be able to give you this,' he said — and I was delighted, too, because we have got to know each other a little over the years.

It all started when HRH wrote me a lovely letter out of the blue about my 1998 unabridged audiobook Oliver Twist. We met a handful of times over the following years and I was invited to spend three nights at a house party at Sandringham, with other guests including Michael Morpurgo, Jeremy Paxman, Sir Antony Sher, Stephen Fry and David Hockney. The Prince welcomed me with a hug and said: 'There's something I want to show you. Here, come with me.'

I followed him and there, in the entrance of the house, was a curious leather chair that wobbled. 'What do you think it is?' he asked.

'Well, it looks like a big fireside chair, or a sofa,' I replied.

He said, 'No, it's a weighing machine,' explaining that when Edward VII, his great-great-grandfather, had his house parties, he would weigh each of his guests on arrival and departure and if they hadn't put on weight, he felt he had failed as a host. He showed me the old original weighing book with all the famous people with their weights noted alongside.

What a terrifying thing to see as a guest. I said: 'I hope you're not thinking of weighing me!'

The weekend continued swimmingly (so much so, I even went swimming with Camilla at Holkham sands). She and Prince Charles are cracking good hosts, the food is spectacularly good — and to crown it all, I was given a doggie bag of grouse to take home.