“Richard Harris had just died and they approached me and I decided to play it with a posh Irish accent, rather like Harris,” he continued.

“I’d never seen any of the previous films but working on the series was huge fun - and for lots of dosh.”

The 74-year-old, who as a young actor trained with Sir Laurence Olivier, now avoids roles with “lots of words”, he admitted in an interview.

He finally took the decision to bow out from stage work after an experiment involving lines read to him via an audio headset proved a failure.

Sir Michael explained: “There was a girl in the wings and I had a plug in my ear so she could read my lines. And after about an hour I thought, ‘This can’t work. You can’t be in theatre, free on the stage, shouting and screaming and running around, with someone reading your lines.

He added: “You know, when you’re there in front of an audience, that you’re not as good as you could be.

“It’s a horrible thing to admit, but I can’t do it. It breaks my heart. When the script is in front of me and it takes me forever to learn, it’s frightening”.