“There’s always a bridge to be built if the way is there and the mercy is great.”

— Kate (on reuniting with her daughter, Danielle, whom she gave up for adoption).

You’re mainly known for TV, but you’re back on the big screen in Drawing Home.

I loved playing a mother who didn’t want her daughter to marry this bohemian artist — and having Peter Strauss as my husband!

And Orange Is the New Black is still a hit.

That’s for sure. I’ve been at this for 43 years, so I had to throw my vanity as an actress away to play this full-bodied Russian woman who’s been in prison for years. We’ll finish the sixth season in February.

What can we expect?

It feels very new, far more treacherous. We’re going into this facility where the stakes are raised. These are bad, bad women, and I get involved with one! There are still surprises — wicked surprises.

Do you feel you’ve reached the goals you set 43 years ago?

Oh, no. And that will never be, because there is no satisfaction in a true creative mind. My longings are intimate and wide and yearning! I signed a deal with HarperCollins for a book about my relationship with my parents and after that I’m going to do fiction. At 62, finding parts is the challenge.

What were you like as a kid?

I was the oldest girl in my family of eight children and even when I was 6, I think I had a gravitas. Some daughters are allowed to mature organically. I wasn’t. My mother shot me into the world like an arrow that

had her name emblazoned on it.

You said that playing Kathryn Janeway on Star Trek: Voyager changed your life…

[First lady] Ms. Clinton even invited me to speak at the White House, which was overwhelming.

But it came with big challenges, didn’t it?

I had just divorced my first husband [Robert Egan] and had two sons [Alexander, 33, and Ian, 34] who were around 9 and 10 when I got it — an impressionable age. Though I had livein help in the person of an angel named Lucy, I had to work about 18-hour days for seven years, and the weekends were devoted to the kids.

That’s intense.

I still carry that guilt with me. I don’t think it will ever completely go away, and I don’t really trust actors who say they don’t have it. You’re taking on the responsibility of a human life. I felt the conflict every day. On weekdays I didn’t get to tuck them in or have breakfast with them, because I was usually up at 4 a.m. and home at midnight. Having said that, I wouldn’t change it if I went back. That’s what ambition, talent and opportunity are, and when all three pull you in a certain direction, you generally go, but it doesn’t mean you feel good about it.

How are your sons doing today?

Alexander is a well-known painter in Venice and Ian is a wonderful writer. They would tell you, especially over wine, that they missed me and there’s no returning to that

chapter. I think there will come a time when there will be equality — when guilt will no longer be a feeling women have, because they’ll be in the workforce as strongly as men.

You were brave writing about your 1982 rape in your memoir, Born With Teeth.

I don’t consider that brave, because it wasn’t one of the significant traumas in my life. It was a complete stranger who came off the street and tied me up at knifepoint, and then I had no knowledge of him. It doesn’t take him off the hook, of course, but I understood that he was in despair. If you compare it to what’s going on in Africa to girls, I’ve suffered very little.

I love how you reconnected with your daughter, Danielle, 40, whom you gave up for adoption in the ’70s.

Not only reconnected — she’s been deeply in my life for the past 22 years. We just had Thanksgiving together. She’s a remarkable girl, full of a strange kind of wisdom.

What wisdom have you gained with age?

I’d like to be kind, but you care less what people think of you. It’s harder to let go of vanity than they tell you. You just sort of let go and get lighter. We all have to die, darling, and it’s part of getting ready. I’m trying to do it with as much grace as I can muster!