From Bond girl to badass grandmas, Tsai Chin has had an extraordinary career. She talks about her battles with racism, predatory producers – and farting leopards

‘I have lived on my own since 1963,” says Tsai Chin down the phone from her home in Los Angeles. “It doesn’t mean I haven’t had a sex life.” But it does mean that the 88-year-old actor brings something special to her latest role as a beguilingly irascible, chain-smoking widow who faces down triad thugs over stolen money in the comedy Lucky Grandma. Apart from the smoking, Grandma Wong is my new role model.

“I’m tough but my heart is very soft,” she says. And that is the key to Grandma Wong, a woman who projects to the world the opposite of what she is inside. In the film, she has a shrine to her late husband in her meagre Chinatown apartment in New York. She’s alone and impoverished but isn’t quite ready to give up her independence and move in with her sweet if bougie son in his brownstone.