LONDON (AP) — Lindsay Duncan, one of the stars of HBO’s “Rome,” can’t quite decide whether it’s funny or sad to look back to her first TV role, which also was set in the Eternal City.In 1975, she played a bit of eye candy, a girl called Scrubba, in a campy farce about Roman revelry called “Further Up Pompeii!”

“When I say, `I had no idea what I was doing,’ I had NO idea. I didn’t even know how television was made, and it was live, so it was a kind of nightmare, though perhaps a very funny nightmare,” Duncan recalls. “When I went to the audition, I was asked to show my legs, which I did, God help me — not that I’ve got anything to be ashamed of.”

She certainly hasn’t.

Now a mature beauty and a major star of the London and Broadway stage, the 56-year-old actress is the manipulative Servilia of the Junii, lover of Caesar and mother of one of his assassins, Brutus, in the epic series about the tempestuous struggle for power in early Rome.

“To play such an aristocratic woman you need someone who can carry that off with great aplomb,” says Bruno Heller, co-creator of “Rome.” “Someone who can bring genuine gravitas and dignity.”

“There’s always a kind of undertone of humour,” he adds, “and such intelligence there that you believe that this is a woman, who, though she is not running the Republic, is manipulating the politics in such a way that she is the First Lady of Rome.”

“Rome” returns Sunday at 10 p.m. Bermuda time for its final 10 episodes.

Caesar is dead and Gaius Octavian, son of Servilia’s rival, Atia of Julii, is worming his way to power, so Servilia’s fate is in the balance.

“She has a bumpy ride, poor woman,” says Duncan, exhibiting more sympathy for Servilia than the Roman matron ever earned in real life.

Because of the decision to end “Rome” after just two seasons, Servilia’s fascinating storyline is one of several in the intricate drama that had to be speeded up to what Heller calls “the money shot” — the death of Anthony and Cleopatra.

Duncan regrets that, but delights in the whole experience of the ambitious and lavish undertaking, which employed a stellar cast of actors and a wealth of craftspeople, expert in set, prop and costume design.

Chatting in a cafe in the London borough of Hampstead, the Scottish-born Duncan said she’s praying to “whatever deity I can summon” that she’ll have another chance to work on “a show of this scale again.”

That’s not to say she doesn’t keep busy. On February 17 at 9 p.m. she plays a very different woman, Lady Elizabeth Longford, in HBO’s reality-based drama “Longford,” scripted by Peter Morgan, screenwriter of the current, widely acclaimed film “The Queen.”

“Longford” explores the strange case of Lord Longford (Jim Broadbent), a flamboyant, liberal British politician whose deep religious faith and long devotion to prisoner rehabilitation drew him into advocating the rights of a notorious murderer, Myra Hindley (Samantha Morton).

Hindley and lover Ian Brady (Andy Serkis), whom the media dubbed the Moors Murderers, had brutally killed several children in the 1960s and Longford was lambasted for his stance.

Duncan says she knew “nothing” about Lady Longford, an acclaimed historical biographer, who died in 2002, aged 96. But she does know her daughter, Antonia Fraser, also a famous biographer, whose book “Maria Antoinette” she had recorded.

“She sent round a copy of her mother’s memoir, so that was lovely, but also completely alarming to have it passed on to me by the daughter, because I felt the responsibility very keenly. I didn’t want to misrepresent her in any way,” Duncan says.

Although the part is a supporting role, “it’s not peripheral because she has her moment and a very important moment it is, which, slightly surprisingly, alters her husband’s thinking,” explains Duncan, who won the best-actress Tony in 2002 for her role in the Broadway revival of “Private Lives.”

Unlike Broadbent, who dons prosthetic makeup to make him appear more like the distinctive, wild-haired Longford, Duncan didn’t feel the need to look like his wife.

But she says she worked “very hard on her speaking voice because it was important to try to get the sense of someone from that sort of period and background, very intelligent, a woman whose way of expressing herself was that of a thinker.”