Stephanie Beacham invites us into the L.A. home she bought during Dynasty days and tells of the changes her first grandchild has made to her life.

As Stephanie Beacham glides past the sun loungers on her way to the restaurant of a hotel in West Hollywood every head turns. It's not that she's dressed to the nines - she's opted today for simple white T-shirt and trousers, set off by a flattering straw sunhat - but, as the song has it, there's something in the way she moves.

Aged in her mid-fifties, the English actress has been a star on both sides of the pond for over three decades. And while many actresses of her generation must now content themselves with leafing through their scrapbooks, Stephanie remains much in demand on both stage and screen.

Her performance in the title role of the play Elizabeth Rex at the Birmingham Rep last year had the critics dusting off their superlatives. Now there is talk of bringing it into the West End.

In the late spring, by complete contrast, she joins the cast of TV prison soap Bad Girls. "I was sent some tapes from the first series," she says, her well-modulated vowel sounds quite unchanged after all the years spent in California. "I watched them and then asked for more, not because I was unsure about whether or not to accept the part being offered, but because I was addicted!"

The restaurant the actress has suggested we meet at today is not too far from her LA apartment. She bought the home 15 years ago when she was starring in Dynasty and at that time also owned a magnificent house overlooking one of Malibu's ravishing bays. But, as her journey from Malibu to the TV set could take at least an hour and a half, she wanted somewhere in the centre of town. Her solution was a sunny apartment a mere five minutes' walk down the road from Sunset Strip.

Waiting for her back home after lunch are both her daughters- Phoebe, 28, and Chloe, 26 - and what Stephanie describes as the new man in her life. He is also the reason why, despite her recent success in Britain, she is keen to return to LA whenever she can. He's blond, he's beautiful and he's a little thug, she says, quite unable to keep the silly smile off her face.

His name is Jude and he's her first grandchild, the two-year-old son of Phoebe, who lives in the same apartment block as her mother and who works for Chanel in Beverly Hills. Sadly, Phoebe and her English husband have now separated, but nothing can disguise his grandmother's rapture over Jude. "He's the son I never had," she says.

Following in her mother's footsteps, Phoebe trained at the Bristol Old Vic and had her sights set on becoming an actress. "When I moved to California in 1985," says Stephanie, "the girls were only ten and eight so, apart from their schooling, they grew up here. Phoebe says she may return to England when Jude is ready for regular school, but I have my doubts. If you want to pursue acting, this is the place to be."

"When I'm here, I'm Jude's nanny. I'll collect him from school and it's either straight into the swimming pool - I'm lucky in that there's a choice of two as part of my apartment block complex - or up into the canyon for a walk with the dogs and then back for tea. He calls me 'Glamma', a name I love, of course, and one the irony of which he's much too young to understand."

Clearly, Jude can do no wrong. "Not quite true," says his doting grandmother. "He's not yet civilised. I've never tipped so heavily as I do if I take that young man into a restaurant. It's my way of saying sorry for whatever he's done."

She checks herself. "Just listen to me! I'm entirely boring, up to my elbows in the blond thug." And evidently loving it.

Stephanie's younger daughter, Chloe, is over on a visit from London where she works as a marketing and PR consultant for the Matchbox Group, owners of a string of clubs. "We always had Chloe marked down as the academic," says her mother, "but she's increasingly showing her creative side. For instance, she's absolutely brilliant at creating handbags out of old jumpers and scraps of material she finds in various shops."

And with that, Stephanie hauls aloft a soft, shapeless bag from beside her feet on the floor. "Chloe is a very sorted young woman who takes no nonsense from me and is clearly someone who's having good fun. I'm a fan of good fun."

It's all a far cry from the years of raising her own children. Married to fellow Royal Shakespeare Company actor John McEnery in 1973, the couple parted and later divorced after five years. Chloe was little more than a babe in arms. Stephanie was shattered by the failure of her marriage but she refused to go under.

"As it happens, I took to motherhood from the word go," she says. "This rather sexy butterfly suddenly transformed herself into a single-minded mother."

But not, it seems, at the cost of her career. She was a key member of the cast of the popular TV series Tenko and also played the eponymous Connie, a go-getting businesswoman building up a fashion empire.

But it wasn't until the mid-1980s that Stephanie's life changed irrevocably. Summoned to LA by powerful producer Aaron Spelling, she was cast as Sable Colby, first in Dynasty and then in The Colbys. "I chased the dollar," she says, without apology. "I had the sort of ambition you now see in Catherine Zeta Jones. I had the life force."

She also had a bank balance to water the eyes. "Yes, Aaron made me a millionairess. But then, I've never thought it more saintly to scrub floors, as it were, or be tired all the time. Being a single parent with diamonds struck me as a much cleverer move."

She won't easily forget the moment she was whisked by limousine back to her swanky hotel after that first meeting with Spelling. "I danced around my room in my underwear. This was Hollywood! I had a script with 'Paramount Studios' on its front page. I was Judy Garland! Oh it doesn't get much better than that!"

From the very start of her career, when she appeared on the stage in the UK, Stephanie's CV has been very impressive. "Well it is," she says, "if you weed out the films in which I battled against man-eating insecticides, and a TV serial I made called seaQuest in which I spent an inordinate amount of time in a submarine."

Now, Stephanie is set to return to our TV screens in Bad Girls, which is currently due back on the air on ITV1 in May. She makes her appearance with ex-Coronation Street star Amanda Barrie and together the actresses play Costa Brava conwomen Phyl and Bev, who have been rumbled selling shares in golf courses that never existed.

"I'm the brains and Bev's the one who puts the scams into practice. Nor does being in prison stop us getting up to all sorts of tricks," Stephanie laughs. "It's very silly and great fun, although I don't mind admitting that I began to feel a bit claustrophobic when I first started filming last year as the sets were so solid and convincing."

She's currently completing work on the second half of the 16-week run. The three-month break in between filming was to allow Amanda Barrie to appear in pantomime and it could not have been more welcome, says Stephanie. "People ask how I divide my time and the answer is simple. I'm in Britain when I work and here in California when I can be."

Can she ever imagine retiring? "Not necessarily," she says. "But if it ain't joyful, I ain't doing it. I want my heart to pound; otherwise why bother? I would like to do one more US TV series. I've always had a secret hankering to be the troublesome neighbour in a sitcom."

She's certainly not in it for the money, she says. "I don't need to be enormously rich any more because my life is so rich as it is. Anyway, been there, done that. It was fine, although I have to say that it's never the way it looks from the outside. I distinctly remember worrying that the pH balance in the pool in my house at Malibu wasn't quite right and that the sprinkler system beneath the trees I'd had planted was faulty, and so on. I don't want to sound ungrateful. But having lived that sort of life, my conclusion is that yachts are for other people. I'm quite content to hop aboard for a ride every so often."

Her life may be rich, but can she ever contemplate sharing it with someone else? There have been boyfriends down the years but she's never remarried. "My two best male friends are a gay couple," she says, "although I'm also very close to my best friend at the beach, Colin. He looks after the dogs, Bruno and Kelsey. My horse, Blue Star, also lives on his ranch at Malibu."

"People often ask why Colin and I aren't together and I always say that we are, for life. It's just that we're not partners. We couldn't be. We're both control freaks. We couldn't withstand the power struggle that comes with being lovers, too. Sex always complicates things. But, as friends, we're fine."

Stephanie is not complaining. "I feel completely blessed by the fullness of everything. I have so much love in my life - from my girls, of whom I am extraordinarily proud, from my friends and from that blond thug."

Which is why, last year, Stephanie took an important decision to give something back to society. The charity she has chosen to donate her time to is one which is close to her heart. In the last days of her pregnancy, Stephanie's mother was struck down with chicken pox, which can cause problems to an unborn child. The result was that Stephanie was born with no nerve endings - and therefore no hearing - in her right ear. Her left ear was less badly affected, although it has only 70 percent of its full capacity.

"The children at school could be cruel," she says. "They'd chant 'Steph's deaf!', over and over. And it was certainly a strain being in class because I had to concentrate so hard on listening to what was being said and lip-reading, too. But at home my condition was, in the best sense, entirely ignored. When Mummy realised that nothing could be done about it, she washed her hands of the entire business. The result was that I never became a victim. I could achieve whatever goals I'd set myself. My dreams were left intact."

It was last November, when she was over in the UK filming the first batch of Bad Girls, that Stephanie made a visit to the charity Hearing Dogs for Deaf People in Oxfordshire and was highly impressed with the invaluable work the organisation does.

"They train animals to recognise the phone ringing, or an alarm clock going off, or a washing machine coming to the end of its cycle, and then they alert their owner. It's quite remarkable. Those dogs also provide uncomplicated companionship to someone isolated by their condition from the rest of the world."

Now, Stephanie's mind is made up. "It's my intention to do as much for this charity as I can in terms of speaking up for them and publicising their work. In no way have I been inhibited by my deafness. I've had an extraordinary career, a wonderful life.

"Now," says Stephanie Beacham, "it's time to put something back."