"Switch off your mobile phone for success" and other life lessons from Joanna Lumley

Actress and model Joanna Lumley is pictured promoting sustainability at the Marks and Spencer’s garden (Susannah Ireland)

Who is the most influential role model for today's teenage girls? Is it pop singer Rihanna? Page-3-girl-turned-business-tycoon Katie Price? Or is it in fact, 67-year-old actress Joanna Lumley?

This week Lumley continued her long-term bid to steer the young women of Britain onto the right track, as she sees it, by giving a speech at a £30,000-a-year girls school in Gloucestershire. She told the girls "Don't be a servant to your phone. If all you are doing is reacting to calls then you never develop. You need to have time to be free and for your heads to be free to think." Here is some other advice she's offered over the years:

1. "You must swear never to go on the dole. Find something to do." School talk

2. "I think laptops should be banned from schools. Until you can prove you can add up on your fingers or think independently in your head, you have learnt nothing" Radio Times interview

3. "I urge the public to support the Dongria, who simply want to be allowed to live in peace." Documentary, 'Mine: Story of a Sacred Mountain'

4. "Don’t be sick in the gutter at midnight in a silly dress with no money to get a taxi home, because somebody will take advantage of you, either they’ll rape you, or they’ll knock you on the head or they’ll rob you.", Telegraph interview

5. "Make yourself be happy, and then funnily enough, you'll be happy." Telegraph interview

6. "And don't yawn" School talk