The Iron Lady screenwriter: My job is like giving birth, over and over Within its first few days of screening, The Iron Lady, which depicts Margaret Thatcher in old age suffering from dementia, whipped up a storm. Charles Moore, Lady Thatcher's biographer and a former editor of The Daily Telegraph, called it 'calculatedly unkind to take a real, living person and portray that person as demented. And yet, he added, 'I notice that the Left are attacking it. Ms Morgan last night said it was when she read an article by Carol Thatcher, Lady Thatcher's daughter, about her mother, describing what it is like to be with someone who lives in another world, that she "saw the light" about how to work on the film. Lady Thatcher became Britain's longest serving prime minister of recent times and the West's first female head of government. "It was the light, the stray laugh that betrays the madness of a grieving mother," she told an audience of about 100 people. Suddenly the life of Margaret Thatcher, became the life of a very particular everywoman. A powerful revered and often reviled former Head of State. It would not only be a study of power, but of loss of power. The ability of the mind to play tricks and rewind one's life, would provide a structure, a form for the chaos of a rich and powerful life. But it would be a work of fiction. It would have to carry a bigger truth than simply a biopic. The Iron Lady is not a biopic. "Phyllida Lloyd and Meryl Streep coined it "King Lear for girls." The vision of the writer and director, that was intriguing. With Denis as her Fool, the husband who she still asked for, this would expose the frailty and the vulnerability of us all. Even those who have once been great. Again I started from the place of not knowing anything. I read, I talked to people, I flooded my mind with interviews and articles and political memoirs. In a candid talk about the life of a screenwriter, Ms Morgan said she does not consider herself to be an "artist," more that she is part of the process that creates the "art." Shame came out of a meeting with the director and the artist Steve McQueen. What should have been a blind date lasting no longer than an hour set up by our mutual agents, lasted three. Neither of us took off our coats. It was winter and he must have been boiling in his heavy parka. But it didn't matter. It was a brilliant meeting of minds," she explains. Focusing on the life of a man bound by his own compulsive sexual behaviour, the research took me into a world I thought I knew something about. Sex. We all do it. Or hopefully do it at some point in our lives. Over the weeks, months we worked on this film, together Steve and I met people who had worked with sex addicts or who were themselves recovering or battling with addictive sexual behaviour. This was a world where I found more than a dog whistle. There was a constant surprising underscore of tiny behaviours and almost invisible transactions, that flooded my senses and made me realise that this was a world that affected us all. That I witnessed around me all the time. From the conversations we had with those affected I found such a constant source of inspiration, that [it drove me] to keep searching, to want to open a door and let the light flood in. To live, to breathe is to be sexual. But when one is hard-wired to convert every transaction into a sexual point of conquest, this hovers constantly close on tragedy. Ms Morgan is currently working on series two of The Hour, the TV series about the fast paced world of a newsroom, which is expected to air next year. The joy for me as a writer, is that despite the fact I spend most of my life on my own in a room eating too much chocolate and drinking too much tea, eventually they let me out into the world. She adds: "have been lucky, I have been very, very lucky. It's amongst this ensemble where the work is really made. I never know if I'm the builder or architect. The role shifts all the time. But what I have come to conclude is that the script is the muse. For producer, director, actor, DoP [director of photography] and designer, it is the point of inspiration that everyone must think of as their own. The next film Ms Morgan will release is called The Invisible Woman, directed by Ralph Fiennes and starring Mr Fiennes and Kristin Scott Thomas. It is the story of Charles Dickens" secret mistress. Fore more in the BAFTA/ BFI lecture series visit The Bafta Guru website