‘No one felt guilty about having fun’ – Sadie Frost on the 90s, Dracula and turning her back on Hollywood

In the pub, in a village so quaint it has a duck pond and jars of homemade pickled onions for sale outside cottages, they are talking about the celebrity who has moved in nearby. At least one customer does a comedy double-take when, five minutes later, Sadie Frost walks in. For it is she – actor, fashion designer, 90s cool girl turned director, sausage dog owner and now countryside dweller.

Frost and Cherry the dog moved here in the summer, to a cottage with a perfect thatched roof and views across the hills. She still has a flat in Primrose Hill – the north London area to which she is forever linked – but she has let it to a friend, and when she is in London, she stays with her mum or sisters, so Wiltshire is home now. It has been a time of change. The youngest of her four children has just started university and, at 57, after more than 30 years of parenting, she can suddenly do pretty much whatever she wants. Time, she says, “was always taken up by the kids and, being a single mum, every bit of the day was planned, fitting around them”. When they needed her less, she was left with so much time and energy, she says: “I just thought: ‘I’ll throw myself into as many things as I can that I really feel passionate about.’”

Frost’s documentary, , about the fashion designer Mary Quant, came out last year to decent reviews, and now she is making another one – more fashion, more 60s – about Twiggy, which the model herself asked Frost to direct. As much as she is enjoying this new work, it seems to be a surprise to her. When she was approached to make Quant, she says: “I was like, ‘This is impossible – I would never know where to start.’” She had been an actor first, then a film producer for years, and had directed shorts, but now she submerged herself in research and learned from the team she assembled. “It became fascinating and I lived and breathed it for two or three years.”