Sparkling and funny, Stephanie Beacham has achieved success on both sides of the Atlantic. But not one to be dazzled by her own talent, she is still striving to be the best.

She is talking as she enters the open-air restaurant. "...because I really do think that, if you can't speak English, you ought to say so. Nobody's going to mind - and it'll save so much time. Oh, do come along, Emily."

It is a diamond-bright day in Hollywood and Stephanie Beacham, up since the crack of dawn and locked in "frightfully earnest" conversations with studio bosses ever since, has had a small dust-up with the (non-English-speaking) car-park attendant, a Hispanic intent on valet-parking her car before its owner can remove her handbag and her King Charles spaniel from the rear seat.

You wouldn't need to be told she's a star. The reddish brown hair frames the voluptuous face with its watchful, dark brown eyes and its full, sculpted mouth. Today, she is wearing grown-up clothes (her words): a scarlet linen suit with nipped-in waist, the better to flaunt the trim figure, and a shortish skirt, the better to show off the shapely legs.

She makes her way to the table on heels that would catapult most women into the nearest Caesar salad, and sets about satisfying Emily's immediate needs.

Dogs are not allowed in the restaurant but this does not faze her for one minute. By a mixture of iron will and extreme charm, she achieves what she wants: a bowl of iced water for the pooch and a permanent place beneath her mistress's white wrought-iron chair. "Oh, I do like being famous," she chirrups, artlessly. "Well, it's so useful."

We have met beneath the swaying and sinuous California palms to discuss her most recent body of work. She has recently completed a critically acclaimed run in a Los Angeles revival of Noel Coward's The Vortex. ITV has just bought the Jackie Collins mini-series Lucky Chances, in which she co-stars. But, most pressingly, Stephanie Beacham is keen to discuss another mini-series: the adaptation of the Barbara Taylor Bradford blockbuster, To Be The Best (out on video next month and on TV next year). In it she plays the mysterious and amoral Arabella, red in tooth and claw. She loved every last moment of it.

"If life can't be fun," announces Stephanie Beacham, "then I ain't interested. To Be The Best was nothing but fun. I was surrounded by the dearest people. We had such a superior director, a complete angel. Why have pain when you can have pleasure? That was his motto."

Her co-stars were Anthony Hopkins, Lindsay Wagner - and Christopher Cazenove. "A total love. I dragged him to China a couple of times. [It turns out that part of the filming took place in Hong Kong.] I dragooned him on to big boats. Marvellous. Innocent, though, utterly."

So, apparently, were their love scenes on set. "Oh, they were too funny for words; such a hoot." There were technical problems, though. "One gets used to a particular pair of lips, so it's always a surprise to be presented with a new pair. Chris's lips are thinner than those I've been accustomed to recently. We kept crashing teeth."

Cut to The Vortex. Dramatic pause. "No fun. No, didn't enjoy that." It was, says Stephanie Beacham, a four-and-a-half month confrontation with about as low a psyche as you could get: about as selfish a woman and mother as you could find. Rupert Everett played her son. He played the same part in the recent London production, opposite Maria Aitken.

"I thought it was wonderfully stylish," says La Beacham, silkily, "but the truth is they shouted at each other for the whole of the third act. Oh, it was enormously impressive and a much cleverer way of getting away with it than ours. But we were real. They were only dazzling."

It would be very easy to misread Stephanie Beacham. On the surface, she chuckles with camp wit, a funny, fluent, flawlessly accurate observer of human foibles, and a disarmingly self-deprecating one, to boot. But there is real substance beneath this shimmering veneer. Trained at RADA, practised in Pinter, she has played, to considerable acclaim, at the National and the RSC, and notched up any number of successes in the West End.

On the big screen, she has starred opposite Marlon Brando in The Nightcomers (they remain firm friends). On the small one, she had to dress down for Tenko, up for Connie - and, hey presto, Hollywood beckoned with a plum: Sable in The Colbys, a full-blooded rival to Joan Collins' Alexis in Dynasty.

Miss Beacham did not demur. Her daughters, Phoebe, now 16, and Chloe, 14 (from her marriage to the English actor, John McEnery), safely ensconced in British boarding schools, she moved to Malibu on America's seductive west coast and a house on the beach.

That was six years ago. She's been there ever since. But for how much longer? Free of The Vortex, and bored with the prospect of recreating yet another clone of Sable Colby ("I've done the bitches. Could I have a couple of minutes off? Please."), Stephanie Beacham embarked on what she describes as "a wonderfully scandalous thing", fronting a documentary - the Americans call it reality television - on royalty around the world.

"I decided I'd stand up looking a bit like Princess Michael of Kent and gossip hideously about a lot of royal people I've never met. We had such fun doing it, but I fear I may not be forgiven easily nor ever get to practise my curtsy in front of anyone proper." She laughs.

But ask her about the future and the mood changes. She is just beginning to get to the stage, she says, when the title of her autobiography could be Been There, Done That. Now 44, she's turning down network television series and turning her back - probably, she's not sure - on Hollywood.

She'd like a good part in a good film, preferably European, and may leave America for good - but only for somewhere else warm. "Oh tiddlypush, I don't know. I feel like a good, solid, seaworthy ship, only loosely at anchor at the moment. I could float away just like that." She snaps her fingers.

This wanderlust, in what may well prove to be a watershed year, is not sparked only by professional considerations. After four years together, she and Steve Silver, her cameraman lover 10 years her junior, have painfully but irrevocably separated.

"Steve does not yet have the family he will want and I am not going to marry him. It's awful because we mark each other up as genuine loves. That wasn't an Elastoplast job for four years; that was the proper thing. But, reluctantly, I came to realise that we didn't have a future together. And that hurt. I love him."

So she's being brave. "I've always said that, for a coward, I can be surprisingly courageous." A thin smile. But, in a way, she says, the decision she took sprang from cowardice.

"Steve tells me that he doesn't want children. I don't think, at 34, you can state what you're going to want at 40. And I really couldn't bear to see the look in his eye when he faced the 50-year-old me with his change of heart." So it's best to drift apart now? "No," says Stephanie Beacham. "It's better to sever now," and she slices the air horizontally with her right hand. "You don't drift. That's tantalising. That hurts more."

All right - but why four years? Why not part after three or five? She doesn't hesitate. "Oh, because Steve couldn't give me the moral support I needed for The Vortex. He couldn't be there for me. He wasn't able. He wasn't strong enough to keep me emotionally safe.

"In the end, he told me that either he had to be a studio head or he couldn't be my man. He was proud of me when I was Sable but that role just skimmed the surface. The demands on me in The Vortex - and my ability, however painful, to respond to them - fundamentally changed my relationship with him. It actually emphasised our unsuitability. It made Steve feel insufficient and that's got nothing to do with love."

She falls into a long, reflective silence. "If you think I can tear away from Steve, tear away from him," she says, at length, with some passion, and more to herself than to anyone else, "and not be left with bloody bits, you're wrong." But she's gradually adjusting to being on her own. Nor is she about to rush into a new relationship, particularly with someone also on the rebound. "You've got to be two whole people," she says.

She's unlikely, either, to go for a younger man whenever the time comes to consider another liaison. "Pick on someone your own age, Miss," she says, and laughs. And then repeats it.

She heaves a big sigh. "I think I am strong," she says, again to herself. But it's a strength born of life's knocks. "I'm a jar that's been cracked so many times, I'm all Araldite." So, yes, she's pretty tough but not, she hopes, hard. "I see no virtue at all in that. "

Stephanie Beacham is now at a point where she's taking stock of her life. "You know the rhyme, don't you? 'Good, better, best, Never let it rest, Until the good is better, And the better best.' More and more, I realise that I want to be my very, very best person."

So she sees nothing wrong in earning a great deal of money on less than substantial work. It may be financially rewarding ("been a millionairess, done that") but it really cannot be artistically or intellectually stimulating. To her credit, Stephanie Beacham doesn't flinch.

"Oh, who cares? I am perfectly happy 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], from my family." She has a think about this. "At the same time, I don't exclude, and still desire, a good part in a nice film."

She recently read a biography of Rita Hayworth: it reduced her to tears. "She never got any joy from her career. She was this sweet woman who would have been better off, not with Aly Khan or Orson Welles, but with... well, Steve. With love. Quiet love. Private love. She didn't want to be a sex symbol. Oh, how I wept for her - and oh, how I identified with her."

There the comparison ends. "I am clever enough and mistress enough of my own life to know what to do - what's right for me. The Vortex, you see, may have been frightfully good for Stephanie Beacham, but it sure as hell wasn't good for the Stephie who lives inside here." She taps her head. "And I must have my fun, I really must." It's where we came in.