At 72, Blythe Danner's finding herself in a surprisingly privileged position as an actress. But that hasn't made her 8th decade all sunshine and roses.

In a conversation with HuffPost Live on Tuesday, Danner disclosed that she's still mourning the loss of her late husband, film and television director Bruce Paltrow, who lost his life to cancer in 2002 while vacationing with daughter Gwyneth in Rome.

"I sadly lost my husband just before I turned 60, so everything is a little less fun without him," she said. "He'd be enjoying this so much. And our grandchildren, who he missed. So I can't say it's my happiest decade, but it's my most fruitful decade, I think, ever."

The two-time Emmy Award winner is being offered "more juicy, three-dimensional roles," she claims, and she's not knocking the opportunities to play grandma onscreen either.

"Once you get to be the age of playing grandmothers, you get a lot more bite at the good roles too -- those grandmother roles, which I love," she said.

With age comes life experience, Danner affirmed, giving her more material to weave into her characters.

"I've lived a long time. Here I am in my 70s and I have a lot to draw on. Lots of loss in different scales," she explained. "You just pick it up like a fruit basket and you pour it over yourself and you dive in and you embrace it all. It's one of the good things about being old [and] getting older."