She is one of the West's most famous actresses, and now Sheila Hancock has opened her heart about how poetry helped her beat depression after the death of her husband John Thaw.

In a compelling new TV programme, the 76-year-old actress talks about how she became interested in poetry after the popular star behind Inspector Morse died in 2002.

The documentary, the first in a series called My Life In Verse, sees Hancock in Dorset reflecting on her childhood as a wartime evacuee in the county, and then sees two of her grandchildren reciting poetry in the garden of her Wiltshire home.

A lover of this literary form, in her second memoir Just Me, published last year, she charted her experience of going it alone, and how poetry influenced her choices.

When the production team behind Who Do You Think You Are? came to Sheila with the idea of taking a poetic stroll through her life, she naturally accepted.

"I do feel passionate about poetry," she says. "I'm a late comer to it but I now find it really enriches my life."

Despite having spent much of her career speaking lyrical prose with the RSC, Sheila admits she only became interested in poetry after her husband, actor John Thaw, died in 2002.

She documented her passionate and turbulent 28-year marriage to the Inspector Morse star in her first memoir The Two Of Us: My Life With John Thaw and today reveals how she found solace after his death in poetry.

"People sent me poems, mostly about 'he's not really dead, he's only in the other room', which I just found sickening and untrue and daft," she says, with refreshing honesty. "But I did get lots and lots of poems, some that people written themselves and some that had helped them, and I began slowly to read some myself.

"I started looking back at things like T S Eliot, which I've always found very very difficult, understanding all the literary allusions," she continues.

"I did a poetry reading in a prison when I was at the RSC and I remember saying to Patrick Stewart, 'I don't understand a bloody word of this, what does it mean? I'm sure it's not going to mean a thing to these lifers'.

"But strangely enough, it had a hypnotic effect on these men, just the sound and the rhythm and the use of words. Poetry's potent, if it's done properly." My Life In Verse has an equally hypnotic effect, as Sheila travels to France and around the country, to places where poems have touched her throughout her life.

At the Provencal holiday home she shared with John, and where she recovered from depression after his death, she reads William Butler Yeats' When You Are Old, which contains the heart-renching lines:

Murmur, a little sadly, how Love fled

And paced upon the mountains overhead

And hid his face amid a crowd of stars.

She turns to the camera and, without a moment's hesitation, tells the viewer how, in Provence, soon after John's death, she had felt he would return, until she dreamt about him and finally came to accept that he was gone.

"I had two choices, either to survive or go under," she says on screen. It's a very raw and very brave programme, but Sheila says she didn't find it difficult opening up on camera.

"I wasn't worried about it, I just said it. I'm inclined to shoot my mouth off, sometimes a bit too much, but I'm not very good at pretending or keeping things back, so once I'd decided I was going to do it, then I had to go for it full pelt."

At Dancing Ledge in Dorset, she reads the Tennyson poem Break, Break, Break. Tennyson had written the verses about a friend who died young, but the poem reminded Sheila of being a wartime evacuee and one enchanting night she had spent with a friend, swimming in the sea.

Growing up in London, the daughter of a publican and his wife, Sheila was just seven when the war broke out and eight when she was evacuated to Dorset.

"There's no doubt that being a wartime child does affect you," she says. "Your childhood is spent being very fearful and being ripped away from your parents and labels stuck on you and off you go.

"There were some good times, like the Dancing Ledge episode, but there were also some horrific times."

Besides giving insights into her younger years – and her marriage to John – My Life In Verse is something of a family affair.

Two of her grandchildren recite WH Davies' Leisure to a doting Sheila in the garden of her 17th-century country bolthole in Wiltshire.

And she joins her daughter Melanie, from her previous marriage to actor Alec Ross, at a Shakespearean sonnet workshop for inner city children run by Greenhouse and part-funded by the John Thaw Foundation.

Sheila says it's incredible to see the impact that poetry can have on the young people's lives. "A lot of the kids are from very difficult backgrounds and it's transformative," she says. "When they do a performance, for the first time in their lives, these kids have got respect."

Of all the poems she reads, her favourite is the disturbingly titled Try To Praise The Mutilated World, by Adam Zagajewski, which, she says helped New Yorkers in the wake of 9/11.

"It sums up my philosophy of life, if I have such a thing," says Sheila. "I do think the world is a pretty disturbing place, but it is full of amazingly beautiful, touching things. Sometimes quite tiny, like a feather or a blowing white curtain, or something that can give you a reason for living.

"In my old age, I'm often thinking about the meaning of life and what's the point of it all, you have all this nastiness going on at the moment, or you're disillusioned by people's behaviour.

"But you have to really cling on to the fact that that is not the whole of life, there are actually some amazing people, it's a balance.

"It's very easy these days to say that everything is awful, but it bloody well isn't and I think that poem sums it up in the most amazing way."

Appearing in Sister Act in the West End will keep Sheila away from her Provencal home this summer and when the show's run comes to a close, she's hoping to return there and start work on a novel, which she's reluctant to discuss.

"If I talk about it, I won't write it," she says.

If My Life In Verse does well, Sheila would love to make more documentaries or perhaps even a travelogue. But she fears her age – and gender – might get in the way.

"They don't have older women doing things like that," she says. "Older men can do it, Michael Palin and all that lot. But even the news reporters, like Kate Adie, when she gets to a certain age is taken off camera.

"It's a shame because I think older people have something to say about life that people might find interesting."

At 76, Sheila has no intention of slowing down, and acting is still very much her priority.

"Work keeps me going," she explains.

"I could very well sit at home with my feet up and just vegetate, but everything would seize up if I did that, both my brain and my body.

"I'm not very good at sitting around."

My Life In Verse starts on BBC Two on Friday May 29.