Beauty
Stephanie Beacham reveals the secret of looking great and
keeping trim: Forget all about her star looks one day a week.
The
British star says: "Sunday is mostly a day when I mellow
out, as the Americans call it.
"There's
so much structure to my professional working life that I'm
totally afraid of it in my private life. There are enough award
ceremonies and banquets and balls as it is.
"It's
ridiculous. You have to turn up at something like four o' clock
in the afternoon dressed to the nines in the blazing sunshine.
But that's part of the job.
"All
of which is precisely why my Sundays are so formless. I might
play a game of tennis - the weather never lets you down in
Malibu. Or I might run on the beach.
Fancied
"Or
I might use that one day a week to catch up with friends. People
phone up, come around and flop down. It's the way I like it."
And
there is definitely NOT one of the regular work-outs that help
keep her at 45 envied by women fans and fancied by men.
It's
a day for the beach - beneath Stephanie's cliff-top home on
America's west coast at Malibu.
"I
don't swim in the ocean," she says, "but I do
boogie-board - that's surfing on a flat board. I don't do that
clever standing-up thing. And, anyway the surf boards used by
really practised surfers are extremely hard. You hit a wave and
they can whack you in the face with real force." Unlike
most rich inhabitants of California, Stephanie doesn't have a
swimming pool. "There's no point with the ocean so near.
But I do have a Jacuzzi. And there's a pool in town if I feel
like a warmer dip. The Pacific is pretty chilly. I wear a
wetsuit to boogie-board."
Food
on Sunday is usually from a barbecue. "I'm a lethal cook
and I'm not paying myself a compliment in saying that I'm
terrible. How I ever managed to present family meals, I don't
know. But the food in California is so good, even I can't really
go wrong. There's a particularly delicious curly endive salad
you can get from the Cafe Malibu which is my real favourite.
Coming back to a salad in Britain can be a rather limp and sad
affair."
Sunday
is also a time for reading. "I love it - and the trashier
the books, the better. I recently read Joan Collins' last novel.
It was like eating a marshmallow. Bliss!
"I've
usually got two or three books on the go at the same time, some
of them more serious to balance the nonsense. I also subscribe
to quite a lot of magazines. I'm fond of reading them in bed."
Everything changes of course if one or both of her daughters
(from her dissolved marriage to the actor John McEnery) is over
from England.
Chloe,
16, has just arrived, but this year, for the first time, her
elder sister, Phoebe, 18, has opted for a summer job in Cornwall
to earn a bit of pocket money before she goes to art college in
Bristol in September. "If the girls are here, we might all
paint on a Sunday. Or play computer games, which I hate because
they seem so difficult to me. The girls take them all in their
stride.
"I
can barely use a telephone - and the portable ones totally
confuse me."
When
she's not working, Stephanie will fly to visit her daughters and
her parents, now in their eighties and living in Somerset.
Trim
Sundays
there, she says are completely different. "The only way I
can describe them is as a mass of carbohydrates. I manage to
stay a very trim size in California, but everything in Britain
is arranged differently.
"The
point of going for a walk in England, for instance, is so that
you can come back and have a nice cup of tea and a piece of
cake. Gardening gets done as an excuse for munching endless
toast."
Stephanie,
who became famous as Joan Collins' rival Sable in both Dynasty
and The Colbys, is now working opposite Roy Scheider in
a new TV series called seaQuest, with Steven Spielberg
as executive producer.
Set
in the year 2017, the action takes place on a submarine.
Stephanie is an oceanographer and the resident doctor.
ITV
has already bought the series which we'll probably start seeing
this autumn - at much the same time as viewers in America.
"That's
the power of Spielberg for you," says Stephanie. "We
don't finish filming all 22 episodes until after Christmas. But,
with his name attached to the project, no TV company in its
right mind is going to let it gather dust."
