Amanda Redman's 2000 film Sexy Beast returns on 28 September in a limited-edition box set, and the actor, now 69, has been reflecting on the career that built her reputation — including the moment a pretend Bafta acceptance speech went badly wrong.

Redman, born in Brighton, trained at the Bristol Old Vic theatre school. Her screen breakthrough came with the TV comedy drama El C.I.D. in the 1990s, followed by At Home With the Braithwaites, which ran from 2000 to 2003 and earned her a Bafta nomination. She then played the lead in the BBC series New Tricks for a decade, until 2013. Later work includes The Trials of Jimmy Rose and The Good Karma Hospital.

Asked by the Guardian when she was happiest, Redman was unequivocal: "I am happiest when I have my daughter and granddaughter with me." She has a daughter and lives in London with her second husband.

The interview, published ahead of the Sexy Beast rerelease, ranges widely over her life — a "terrible accident" as a toddler, what she calls her bossy nature, and her sense that she is now too old to play a Shakespearean heroine. It also delivers the anecdote that gives the piece its headline: her most embarrassing moment, which she identifies as "getting caught doing a pretend Bafta speech".

The timing is apt. Redman has twice stood close to Bafta recognition without the statuette — or at least without the speech she rehearsed in private. At Home With the Braithwaites, created at the turn of the millennium, gave her one of the defining roles of her career: a lottery-winning housewife whose family life unravels. The Bafta nomination that followed confirmed her standing among British television's leading actors of the period.

New Tricks then made her a fixture of primetime BBC schedules for ten years. The police procedural, in which she led the cast until 2013, remains one of the longest-running commitments of her career and the role many viewers still associate with her.

Sexy Beast, the film now returning to shelves, sits apart from that television work. Released in 2000, the same year At Home With the Braithwaites began, it cast Redman in a feature that has endured long enough to merit a box set a quarter of a century later.

Redman's reflections on Shakespeare carry a note of resignation rather than bitterness. She feels, she says, too old for the heroines she once might have played — a candid admission from an actor still working, and still being asked about her most celebrated roles.

The limited-edition box set of Sexy Beast arrives on 28 September, giving audiences a fresh chance to see Redman in the film that coincided with her Bafta-nominated peak.