Stephanie Beacham, TV's "Sable Colby" and "Sister Kate" was told to give up acting because she was deaf. Fortunately, she didn't listen...

Stephanie Beacham's biggest problem right now might be that she's in the midst of a grueling run of The Vortex, and her well-being as well as her voice is suffering. Or it may be her worries about the war in the Gulf, as her children are in England attending school and she worries about them traveling. But she'll tell you flat out that it's not her deafness. Never has been Never will be.

As a child, so-called specialists gave Stephanie a battery of tests and tried as many rudimentary means of cure as they could before the impairment was rendered untreatable. "I can remember going along and having my adenoids out when I was four," Stephanie recalls "And having to do stupid jigsaw puzzle tests and the doctor saying, 'She's very bright,' and my mother saying, 'Yes, I know.' It was all very primitive and once they found out nothing could be done, we never touched the subject again."

Aside from being left alone in the hospital for the adenoid surgery, Stephanie remembers her childhood as uneventful, yet nurturing in the most complimentary way. "We had a safe neighborhood. The children all knew each other. The parents all knew each other," she recalls. "I went to convent schools and had nuns for teachers. I loved Sister Cyril. She's really who I based Sister Kate on. She was one of my teachers and she taught me very important things, like how to turn the pages of a book and sit up straight."

Even in school, there were no special concessions made for Stephanie, except that she sat in the front of the class, on the right hand side, where she could use what hearing she has in her left ear. "It was a problem because I couldn't sit with the baddies, with my friends. It might have given me slightly more education than I would have gotten otherwise," she says. "The only other thing was the problem with being called Steph, because Steph's deaf. That's a little rhyme I remember well. I will not be called Steph. I can't bear it. People who call me Steph aren't my friends and don't know me."

But despite teasing by some children, Stephanie did have a lot of friends and calls her childhood "treasured." "I can't think of any other way to describe it except that anything my mother's ever done has been cozy and cozy is probably the key word to my upbringing," she offers. "I don't think anything really nasty happened to me until I was twenty-nine. I don't know how my parents had the ability to give us the confidence to know we could do anything we wanted with our lives."

For Stephanie, that meant a career in the performing arts, and roundabout path to acting. "I think I was more interested in movement than I might have been if I were a hearing person, and I don't think my appreciation of music is as wide as it might have been. I did ballet five times a week; I was in love with the movement of music, because the vibration comes through the wooden floor. I thought, 'This is what I'm going to do. I'm going to teach deaf people how to dance.'"

By the time she traveled to Paris at age seventeen, Stephanie's goals were slightly modified and, rather than studying ballet, she sought out a teacher of mime. "It seemed to fit in with everything I was keen on. But I found mime very dry, very unemotional. I found it too strict," she says. "But I went to visit a boyfriend in a theater in Liverpool, and I looked at what they were doing and I thought, 'This is theater. This is what I want to do.'"

When Stephanie got to the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts in London, for the first time in years, she worried that her deafness might affect her goals. Rather than bring up the subject again to her mother, she went to the school's dean and asked his opinion. "He sent me to a top specialist who was very destructive," she recalls angrily. "He said, 'Following the graph of your hearing, I would say you should give up the Royal Academy. You should give up acting because you're going to be stone deaf within a couple of years.' I don't think I've ever told anybody to f- off in my whole life, and I don't tell anybody now, but told him."

Though furious, Stephanie was undaunted. "I don't think that [my deafness] gave me a stronger desire to succeed, but I think it helps your concentration and then helps you with whatever you decide to concentrate on," she explains. At that time, Stephanie was concentrating on becoming an actress and with that goal firmly entrenched, she visited another specialist. He gave her more practical advice; namely, take care of the hearing she does have. "He was just giving me the positive route to take," she says.

Taking that route in everything she did, Stephanie became well-known in English theater. "Theater is the one thing that someone who is really quite deaf can do," she observes. "You know everybody's lines. Chances are you're looking at the actor. If not, they're projecting enough anyway because the audience has to hear. But I don't prefer theater. I like filming."

To that end, Stephanie moved to the United States when she began to feel limited by Britain's entertainment industry. Her first U.S. role: Sable Colby on The Colbys. For the hearing-impaired actress, television presents some unique problems. Cameras have to be on Stephanie's good side, so she can hear instructions. It helps if the actors are on that side as well. But most surprising to Stephanie was the difficulties she encountered in the looping studio, where voices are sometimes dubbed in after taping.

"Normally, what you have is a pair of earphones and the earphone on one side will give you what you did on the tape, and the other side is free for you to hear what you say," she explains. "But if you cover my good ear, I start talking like this [flat, with no intonation]. Unless you hear what you are saying, your speech is affected. I always thought deaf people [sounded that way] because they hadn't learned [to speak]. Meanwhile, the crew members wondered why this woman, this elegant Sable Colby, was suddenly talking like a deaf person." It took them a while to figure it out, but the problem was solved when the audio crew devised a way to input both tracks into the same ear.

Not so easily solved were the problems in Stephanie's eight-year marriage, the end of which also contributed to her move to the States. With two girls, Phoebe and Chloe, to support, Stephanie thought the opportunities in Los Angeles would better serve her needs. Her parents weren't so sure.

"The one thing that was never mentioned in our house was money. It was extraordinary because we had all the comforts but money was never mentioned. It was a dirty subject. My parents, and my mother in particular, never had any interest in the financial value of anything. It has to be the spiritual and emotional value of everything," Stephanie says. Her parents recognized Los Angeles as a different sort of city, one that exists for people on the make.

"That was me too," Stephanie admits. "I came here and it saddened my parents enormously that I came here for the dollar because I was a single mum and I wanted to make the school fees. They felt I had replaced the value of love - through a disappointing marriage - with the value of money. It took them a couple of years to realize that I was, in fact, the same Stephie, that I hadn't changed, that I was making my own coziness here."

That childhood coziness is something Stephanie strives to bring with her wherever she goes, but she pragmatically realizes it's next to impossible to give her children the same kind of upbringing she had. "We had a simplicity of routine that I have tried to emulate, but have never been able to achieve because I'm an actress and I've been all over the place. Christmas holiday meant going to London to have fish and chips, get fitted for our school uniforms and visit Father Christmas at the big store. These were absolutes. I've tried to give my children the same set of values, but I've almost had to artificially place them and, of course, you can't do that."

Regretfully, Stephanie acknowledges that Los Angeles, while necessary for her career, isn't the ideal place to raise children. "I love them being here; it blows enormous fun through their veins, but I think that the values are dangerous here because it's a great shame to associate success with money," she says. "Some of the most successful human beings I know live very quiet, low-key lives and I'm not saying those people don't exist here, but I'm in show business so that's not the environment I find."

Stephanie prefers the environment her parents now have in their countryside cottage in Somerset, England. It's a small village with cobblestone streets and everything, Stephanie says, that you'd expect an English village to be that it usually never IS when you get there. "My parents are very old now and when Mummy had to go into the hospital a while ago, Daddy said I wish all these wretched women would stop bringing down these pots of stew for me.' But the truth is, they are surrounded by people who care. They're hale and hearty because they're surrounded by love. And they give love and that makes them successful human beings," Stephanie says. "They live where they can understand a community. This something that when we all move, are always moving up in the world, we lose. I'm sure that's why children get into trouble. Because they don't have the headmaster living in the house opposite, the local doctor next door, the people who are monitoring them and showing they care."

Ironically, on at least one level, Stephanie feels more comfortable in Los Angeles than she does in her native England. In Britain, she's a bigger celebrity than she is here, which makes her uncomfortable. Even when she visits her parents' little village, she's treated differently because the locals have all seen Sable Colby. "It all changes," she notes. "It makes me shy because I feel that I have a reputation to overcome before they're going to get to the real person again. And if you have to prove doubly, then you're overdoing it in some way, so that makes me shy."

It is also possible, says Stephanie, that her deafness may have made her less sociable to begin with, simply because it has always put her in a little bit of a panic when confronted with crowds. Because of this, perhaps, Stephanie is especially interested in helping children overcome problems created by deafness. Part of her effort led her to become a spokesperson for the American Speech, Hearing and Language Association (ASHLA). "There are some people who blow their charities more than their work," Stephanie says. "I think it's important for people to know that I'm deaf actually. There's an enormous empathy among everybody who's hearing impaired. It's like a subliminal club." In that capacity, Stephanie and ASHLA are in the process of developing a series of television promotions which will stress the importance of early hearing tests for children.

There is no reason on earth why a child with a hearing impediment can't achieve everything," Stephanie says ardently. "I tell children, 'Find the thing you're good at. You've been given a special concentration because you've needed it to help you with your hearing. Find the thing you think you are good at and concentrate on it and I tell you, you'll go to the top.'

"I refuse to be saddled with my difficulty. I fought to get past it. I think it would make me more angry than anything if society thought I had to be dependent. Why not have a red light so you don't have to hear the phone ringing? You know, those sort of things," Stephanie points out. "Hearing aid specialists have accused me not of not accepting it, but of being too stubborn. And I am very stubborn about leading as completely normal a life as I possibly can. Sometimes there are accidents, like I don't hear the phone. But on the other hand, I think you can give into a disability and that is unhealthy. Of course, trust in God helps with everything. Thank you God for what you have given me, including what would seem to be a disadvantage. I understand that it's part of your great plan."