For four years she revelled in his youthful openness. But when the crunch came Stephanie Beacham's love affair with toy boy Steve Silver cracked. He lacked the maturity to support her through crisis. She'll never forget the trauma of parting.

Stephanie Beacham will never erase the memory of last January from her mind. It was on the 15th of that month she and Steve Silver, the cameraman who'd been her lover for four years, split up. "At exactly the same time the Gulf War started," she says wryly. Their age gap - Steve is 10 years younger than 45-year-old Stephanie - wasn't the only difference likely to cause conflict between them. Steve wasn't rich or famous. And finally the relationship caved in under the pressures from all directions.

Stephanie was stretched to the limit doing eight performances a week in the play The Vortex, in Los Angeles. "I was in a crippled state of increasing fatigue," she explains.

"And I believe my performance went from strength to strength because I myself was being driven further and further, emotionally, into a deep pit.

"Steve just couldn't see me through it," she says softly. "He had enough to do coping with the death of his father. In a relationship you have to be very nurturing and sometimes one person needs a larger half of the chocolate bar. The trouble was I think we both felt we were entitled to the lion's share. It's been a bitter disappointment - my Greek God turned out to have feet of clay."

Sipping a cappuccino in a chic Hollywood restaurant, Stephanie looks a million miles removed from the rich bitch TV character Sable Colby. She wears little make-up and is dressed all in white. The only clue to her huge success is her diamond jewellery, and even that's discreet.

Stephanie is philosophical about Steve. "It was the sort of love that comes along very rarely," she says. "We were never a sensible match. I don't think we would have been paired by a computer dating agency. So we're both trying to cling on to that knowledge. And he hasn't had kids, he should at least be free to pursue that."

From the start Stephanie claimed repeatedly that everyone should have their crack at having a family, which she believed was a big stumbling block between her and Steve.

Stephanie already has her two daughters, Phoebe, 16, and 14-year-old Chloe (their father is British actor John McEnery). "We're at different stages in our lives," she explains. "And what we're doing now is mentally justifying what is for both of us a terrible heartbreak."

She admits to going into the relationship with no set expectations, no promises, no desire for marriage, only lots of love.

Stephanie's dating again, but is in no rush to find a new man. Meanwhile, she's revised her opinion on life with younger men. Once a big fan of their freshness and enthusiasm, she now feels the need to look for a man who's achieved as much as she has with a similar level of confidence.

"I don't think it's a pity," she adds firmly. "I think that along with the very few advantages of youth come many disadvantages. It's much better to be able to look at someone, wink and know you've both had the same life experience, which might mean we have a similar reaction to things."

But what if he's too busy ogling the 21-year-old across the room to notice the wink? "Oh, that sort of middle-age insecurity. I don't know yet. I think that anything I'm up to at the moment - or Steve's up to - is a form of reaction.

"We did put an awful lot of our hearts into each other and now we're both in a very sore stage of torn flesh. I saw Steve the other day, and it was absolutely frightful. It was heart-wrenching as you can't go back or go forward. It's a great shame we split. It shouldn't have happened, but it did."

Facing being single isn't half as important, she believes, as the more immediate task of "rolling up my sleeves and knowing I've actually got a hell of a lot of work to do with my girls. I need to be there for them because they are at crucial ages."

Her two daughters go to school in Britain, but during the holidays either Stephanie joins them or they fly to her sumptuous Malibu beach house. But this might be their last summer together as she thinks they will soon start going away with friends. "Leaving me all alone except for my spaniel, Emily."

The star's not certain how long she'll stay in Los Angeles, anyway. "I came on a whim, after all. It was a day's notice, not planned. And what a lucky devil I was! I fooled everyone into believing I was the Hollywood type. But I never took it all seriously. So it wasn't difficult for me to drop Mrs. Colby."

Although the plum film roles have eluded her since The Colbys, she's not been twiddling her thumbs. Most jobs have been such fun she can hardly believe her luck. Recently she and Charlton Heston, her old hubby from The Colbys and a good friend, reunited in LA for a play called Love Letters to great reviews. She will soon be starring in the TV mini-series of Barbara Taylor Bradford's To Be The Best, with Anthony Hopkins, Lindsay Wagner and Christopher Cazenove. Stephanie plays Arabella Sutton, "a woman who is trapped from the beginning and who can be bought and sold".

During filming, Stephanie and Lindsay Wagner had a whale of a time exploring China and Hong Kong together. "I thought, 'Am I really being paid for this?'" she exclaims. "I took her down to Kowloon night market and there were Mrs. Colby and the Bionic Woman fighting over a one pound nightie! It was great. Lindsay's a warm and caring person. I'm very fond of her."

What's next? "It's awfully hard at the moment to do career-building," says the actress. "If you can just keep going, you'll be triumphant. Anybody who's sensible will get their outgoings down a bit. Otherwise you're going to find it becomes, 'Well, I just work for money.' I've turned down quite a lot of TV pilots this year because they seemed stupid. I thought, 'You can do that, girl, but do please know you may not get the money you've been used to."

She smiles. All in all Stephanie has a lot to look forward to. "When I look around I see young people with a wonderful drug-free 60's attitude, and I think that's exciting.

"I'm poised and excited for this next phase. I cannot believe I feel like a gipsy still. I've got the big house and everything, but it's not weighing on me. And no, I don't know what I am going to do next. Literally, anything could happen!"