Miriam Margolyes exposes secret feuds with John Cleese and Lily Allen in scathing rant

Miriam Margolyes lashed out at Lily Allen at the weekend, swiping that she'd thought the Graham Norton Show was "all about her". The 39-year-old had been a guest alongside 83-year-old Miriam and The Devil's Double actor Dominic Cooper, who is now 46.

Speaking at last week's Hay Festival in the Welsh "book town" of Hay-on-Wye, special guest Miriam had been quizzed by author Phillippe Sands on which famous faces she's disliked encountering over the years. Notoriously straight-talking Miriam, who's made Graham blush many a time with her candid confessions, didn't hold back.

"She thought when she was on the programme that it was all about her," she exclaimed. "She thought: 'Who is this woman? Miriam who?' She wasn’t friendly and I didn’t like that and so I showed my dislike, which wasn’t very nice of me because she was much younger than me and I should have just taught her how to behave."

However that was nothing compared to her withering criticism of Fawlty Towers legend John Cleese, 84. Having previously branded the West End performer a "puny tadpole of a person", she added that he'd "become an a**ehole".

Meanwhile, she suggested that The Goodies' Bill Oddie was "not a nice man". Miriam, whose book Oh Miriam!: Stories from an Extraordinary Life was released last year, has taken aim at John numerous times before.

She revealed that she'd had unwelcome interactions with him and his Monty Python co-star Graham Chapman while they were all studying at Cambridge University together.

She was part of the student sketch troupe Cambridge Footlights back in the 1960s, but suggested that she'd been "ignored" by him and pointed to her gender.

"I think they thought I was too full of myself because in those days women were literally not allowed to join the club," she declared, describing John and Graham as "poisonous".

She concluded to the Guardian: "John was a brilliant comedian in his day, but something has turned. Like milk, he's gone sour. He's an irrelevance."

Miriam also had a bad experience with comedian Steve Martin, who co-starred with her in the 1986 movie Little Shop of Horrors.

She called him out last year, claiming he was a "c***" and that her experience had been "vile" - but she didn't elaborate further, leaving fans wondering how they'd fallen out.

Meanwhile, Miriam Margolyes' appearances on the Graham Norton show have had jaws dropping over the years.

She once revealed that she sexually propositioned a soldier in her youth, inviting the total stranger to follow her back to her college so she could perform a sex act on him, years before she came out as a lesbian.

The story prompted a shocked Stanley Tucci to pretend to walk out.

Talking exclusively to Express.co.uk last year, the Graham Norton Show's executive producer Graham Stuart described Miriam as an "unfiltered force of nature" and commended her for her candour.