Hollywood stardom is the clue to Stephanie Beacham's new found air of confidence. Now she's back in Britain hoping to get away with murder.

She says that she will always wish she had longer legs, but there is a new glowing look of confidence about Stephanie Beacham these days.

On a career level, she is returning to British TV in Cluedo as a major international star, thanks to her success in Hollywood over the past five years. Physically, too, Stephanie is in great shape after losing, as she puts it, the plumpish look she gained when she gave up smoking and put on weight last year. And when it comes to personal happiness, an American cameraman called Steve Silver is proving to be very special in her life. But there is just one request she wants to make.

'Please can we have a new category of man that is not toy-boy?' she asks semi-seriously. 'I hate to admit that I'm 42, but I guess that's what I am. He's 10 years younger than me but Steve's definitely not a toy-boy. You don't have 32-year-old toy-boys. Toy-boys stop at 23.

'When Steve and I split up once for eight months, my younger daughter Chloe, who is 13, did say to me: "Mummy, if you were to have another boyfriend, what age do you think he might be?" She was just sort of suggesting that perhaps I should have one exactly my own age. She said it for my protection. But there is not such an age difference really.

'Steve is a perfectly normal, handsome man. He's hunky and chunky, a fine-looking man, so solid, and he has a wonderful way of dealing with the ups and downs of life, providing you don't keep him away from the sea for too long. We are both Pisceans and we have to be near the sea a lot. It's the only place we are happy.

'We met through a musician friend of mine. For me the attraction was absolutely instant - not that I would have admitted it. But I could tell he was nursing something or other and indeed he had been. It was the death of a girlfriend a few years beforehand. You can always tell people who have experienced a lot and that was our point of contact.'

Fittingly, Stephanie and Steve now live together right by the ocean at Malibu, California, where they are joined in the school holidays by Stephanie's daughters by her marriage to actor - John McEnery - Phoebe, now 15, and Chloe. Stephanie also has an apartment in Beverly Hills.

'I'm thoroughly at home now in California,' she says, 'although I'm not saying it's for ever. But it really hurts me when people say my children are at boarding school while their mother lives in Malibu. We all live in Malibu but they go to boarding school in England. In Malibu, Chloe's teddies are all piled up in her room and posters of The Smiths are in abundance in Phoebe's room. They have everything there.

'What was so wonderful about Cluedo was that I could spend their half-term in England. They are both beautiful girls, but that need not be a headache if we keep the communication flowing.

'I was very wild as a teenager, wild but sensible too. I climbed out of a bedroom window at the age of 12 to go back to a party, having been given a curfew of 10.30. I was also twice removed from school because the headmistress wanted my hair changed back to its normal colour. By Chloe's age I had taken off hitch-hiking round the Continent. I feel you have to give a horse good rein but I have to say I look after them and we must keep this contact. It is a hard and wonderful task but it's not one that I want to shirk.

'I have to earn an extra £40,000 a year to cover the education and air fares - in other words for them to go to school in England. Until 1985, the year I did Connie [the Central TV drama series in which Stephanie starred as a ruthless fashion boss], I had never earned £40,000.'

When Stephanie went to Hollywood to play soap superbitch Sable Colby in The Colbys, the Dynasty spin-off, she was miserable at first. She missed her daughters dreadfully and was lonely enough to dub herself The Nun of Malibu.

Ironically, she was a big hit on American TV last year playing a nun suddenly put in charge of an orphanage in a sit-com called Sister Kate.

'It meant that the slightest thing I did caused a furore,' she sighs. 'I only had to go on the beach in a bikini and feathers were ruffled. I kept having to say I was not a nun, I could never be a nun and anyway I had done Playboy and no one should forget it because I wasn't going to!

'Some nights I finished working on Sister Kate at midnight and the first thing I did when I got home was to shower and put my nail varnish on at one in the morning. Also, when you are working with seven children, Michael Nader and John James of Dynasty seemed even better than they did at the time!

'I miss the boys from Dynasty and I seriously miss Joan Collins because she is definitely glamorous and fun.

'What I fear about playing Mrs. Peacock in Cluedo is that people might think it's just a direct, rather over-the-top continuation of Sable but, of course, after Sister Kate and 19 episodes in a habit it is all very different for me.

'Mrs. Peacock is a snob who acquired her money and social standing through her two marriages. But what happened to those two husbands? Weren't their deaths a trifle premature?'

Later this year Stephanie has a small role as a lesbian in the screen version of Jackie Collins's Lucky and then she stars in an ITV drama series called The Lilac Bus.

After living apart from her husband John McEnery for many years, Stephanie is free to marry again after getting divorced with the minimum of fuss.

'I got divorced because it was getting too difficult legally when it came to buying property. When the final papers came through it looked very official and I thought: "Oh dear! This is bound to be a huge bill." Then I said: "Oh no it isn't. It's just a divorce." There wasn't any feeling involved. It was very quiet, very easy. We did it without telling anybody about it.'

Twenty years ago, Stephanie had the chance of making a big impact on Hollywood when she starred opposite Marlon Brando in The Nightcomers. The film's director, Michael Winner, wanted to promote her as an exciting new star, but she acknowledges that she was then too young to cope with Hollywood. She says she was grateful to get another shot at the big time with The Colbys.

Now, thanks to her role as Sable, Stephanie is known around the world as a glamorous star and scripts have been dropping through her letterbox by the dozen wanting her to continue playing sexy bitches.

'You'd think my major task in life was to find my best hairdo!' she laughs. 'Or how low a cleavage I can get away with!'