Stephanie Beacham is taking stock. She wants to write, to produce, to find good film roles. And she wants to do it all in the California sun.

There are two Stephanie Beachams - and they're both a lot of fun. The small-screen version, in the head-turning shape of Sable Colby - deadly rival to Joan Collins' Alexis Carrington in The Colbys - wore her hair big, her nails red, her neckline plunging. Mistress of the crisp putdown, the classically trained English actress created a memorable monster and made a not-so-small fortune into the bargain.

Then there is the equally head-turning creature standing at the front door of her beautiful home in Malibu on America's west coast. The hair is tied back in a simple pony-tail; there is only the merest trace of make-up on the face; the trim figure is covered in a classic plain white shirt and black jeans. Only the rich, well-modulated voice links her to the monstrous, small-screen creation.

British to the core she may be, but Stephanie Beacham just loves living in Malibu. It's not hard to see why. The high-vaulted sitting room and linked kitchen that you reach when you've climbed the stairs from the front door are on a level designed to offer the most breathtaking view of the ocean - and rather more besides.

"I tell you," announces the owner, with undisguised pleasure, "the sunrises and sunsets in this house are so beautiful, I regard them as my time of prayer. They make me feel closer to God. There it all is" - and she waves her hand expansively across the sweep of the coastline - "and I mean, just look. Do you want more than that? Because I don't."

She laughs. "The girls (Phoebe is 18, Chloe, 16, from her dissolved marriage to the actor John McEnery) always grumble that Mummy's come over all silly as I start chanting away. But I don't care. Just this morning, I looked out of the window and saw a migrating whale out in the ocean. I cannot tell you the deep satisfaction I felt inside."

It doesn't end there. "There are dolphins playing out there all the time. And seals too, although - if this doesn't sound too blasé - they're a little more commonplace. And as for pelicans, well, they're two-a-penny."

Stephanie Beacham, you will have gathered, likes where she lives. But it's not without its problems. When the lure of Tinseltown and all that lovely loot first loomed, she sat down with her daughters and discussed the best course of action for all of them.

After a string of nannies, both girls happily opted for boarding school in Britain with the promise that every last bit of holiday would be spent with their mother in America or wherever she happened to be filming at the time. "But now," says Stephanie, "I want them to come and live with me over here. This will be the last time we can all be together and I want to savour it."

She is enormously proud of her two girls, more so since she brought them up almost single-handedly. It wasn't always easy, Stephanie's the first to admit, but her reward is the close and loving relationship the three share today.

Meanwhile, there is her career to consider. British audiences saw her again recently in the Anglia Television mini-series of Jilly Cooper's best-selling Riders, a breathless saga of horseplay - both in and out of the saddle. "I didn't have much to do," says Stephanie, "and it was the best possible fun: a couple of weeks filming in France and a couple more in Norfolk."

She is also talking to Anglia about another mini-series (she won't say what) and there is a chance of her doing a sitcom for British television in the autumn. She has also landed a role opposite Roy Scheider, of Jaws fame, in Steven Spielberg's debut American television show seaQuest. Then there's her ongoing, if infrequent, role as Luke Perry's wayward mother in Beverly Hills 90210 (now to be found on Sky).

She had originally played Sister Kate, in charge of a convent full of children, in an ill-fated sitcom on American television. "I must say," she announces, eyes twinkling, "I used to think I was a good person until I became a nun." But at least one positive thing came out of the experience: her friendship with her co-star Jason Priestley.

"I'm so fond of him and he's so fond of me that, when Luke was worrying about who should play his mother in Beverly Hills, Jason not only suggested me, he rang the producer, Aaron Spelling, to recommend me. So it was actually Jason who cast me.

"I get stopped in the street by young girls. I used to imagine it was because they were excited to meet me. But now I know better. It's because I've actually touched the hands of Jason Priestley and Luke Perry."

The way her life and career have gone, Stephanie Beacham now finds herself at a point where she's taking stock. "You know the rhyme, "Good, better, best, Never let it rest, Until good is better, And the better is best?" More and more I have come to realise I want to be my very, very best person."

She asks you to imagine that life is a tree. "It doesn't necessarily mean inching over and over until you're at the end of one particular branch. You may be starring in every single, flipping thing but what about the rest of the tree? You've gone so far out on a limb, you're missing life."

So she's come up with a different solution. Work of quality is fine but she makes no apology, either, for appearing in soaps ot taking guest spots in a variety of shows; she was in a recent episode of Star Trek, for instance.

"I am perfectly happy," she says, "to get my quota of grown-up, creative stimulation from my real life - from charity work, from my work with the deaf (she is totally without hearing in her right ear and with slightly impaired hearing in her left), from my family." She pauses and smiles. "On the other hand, I don't exclude - in fact, I still desire - a good part in a nice film."

In time, she thinks, she may have to create that part for herself. "I feel I ought to have more input from the beginning of a project. I can see the prospect of a word processor looming into view. I'd like to write, yes. And I'd like to produce. I must be patient, but I do think the time has come for my career to be more representative of how and who I really am."

In the meantime, she has the considerable creature comforts of her Spanish-style home from which she might, just might, move, she says, but not far. "I'd only go up the road or round the corner. It's just that I don't like staying anywhere too long."

When she first moved to California, her parents - both still alive and living in Somerset - were concerned. "They were desolate when I opted for money rather than love but then, as I pointed out at the time, money gives you so much more security. They were unhappy, I think, about the notion of Hollywood. But they've been over here now and I'm still the same old Stephie. It's just that I've based myself in the sunshine."

Ask Stephanie if there are any men in her life at the moment and she smiles wickedly. "Yes, thanks, lots." A long affair with cameraman Steve Silver broke up a couple of years ago but Stephanie Beacham certainly doesn't look like a woman who cries herself to sleep each night. She admits that the break-up of her marriage was shattering at the time, but she picked herself up and, with the love and support of her family, learned to come to terms with her heartbreak.

It's time to go. She pauses as we head for the stairs. "Do you know why I like living in California?" she asks, unprompted. "It's the weather. It really does make a difference. If I plan a barbecue here for a Sunday, it happens. Tennis games don't get rained off. Oh, it's such fun to live by the ocean and work in the movies."

And beyond the sliding glass doors, the Almighty has laid on a sunset to put the inventor of Technicolor himself to shame.