A penchant for playing strong-willed women (in Dynasty and Connie) has gained Stephanie Beacham a reputation as a formidable lady. In truth, as John Selby discovers she is disarmingly warm and witty

When word came through that Miss Stephanie Beacham would be interviewed in a specially reserved enclave of London's legendary Savoy Hotel, it seemed entirely appropriate. The actress who breathed life - and fire - into Sable Colby, the woman, red in tooth and claw, who squared up to Joan Collins' dazzling creation of Alexis Carrington, in Dynasty, was scarcely likely to have opted for a Big Mac.

Cushions are plumped. Coffee and smoked salmon sandwiches are ordered. A palpable sense of nervous anticipation hangs in the air. And then, all of a sudden, a quite unexpected creature appears. Dark hair in a loosely layered cut, soft grey and green clothes masking the famous hour-glass figure, Stephanie Beacham is already talking as she comes into earshot.

"Sorry I'm a moment or two late," she says, lowering herself on to the plush sofa, "but I'm having a little trouble with my net curtains. I've got a new washing machine, you see, and I switched it to some drying cycle, it whirred a lot, made all sorts of noises, but it won't let me have my curtains back." Then there's the carpet. "A very nice man came round and explained that, while most of it can be steamed, some of it will have to be replaced. Ooh, coffee, how lovely."

Attractive and funny, warm and friendly, Stephanie Beacham may be. Sable Colby, she's not.

The classically trained actress, who found fame and considerable fortune in Tinseltown, is back in Britain on a flying visit, both directly and obliquely triggered by her two adored daughters.

Hollywood is where the lucrative work is and that's where Stephanie Beacham has opted to base herself. With expensive school fees to pay for both girls, the practical Miss Beacham is giving her North London home a proprietorial spring-clean before renting it out to the highest bidder.

The more pressing reason for her visit has been the Confirmation of her younger daughter, Chloe, by the Bishop of Taunton in Wells Cathedral. "Frankly, I didn't like to go up to him and get a Blessing because I knew I'd have flirted with him. He's such a dish and so inspiring. Afterwards, Chloe said: 'Oh Mummy, I feel so clean.'"

Their mother is delighted with the Church of England boarding school which fifteen-year-old Phoebe and her thirteen- year-old sister are attending. She herself was educated at a convent, not, she says, because the family is Roman Catholic but because the academic standard was so high. "In fact, I'm a Buddhist." She pauses and laughs. "This is a bit heavy, isn't it? From net curtains to Buddhism in one bound." But she carries on. "I do think it's very important for God to be in your life; then you can decide what form He should take."

She behaved, she says, like so many ex-convent girls: the minute she left school, she rebelled, she became an atheist, then she became an agnostic and finally she started investigating other religions. "Whenever I checked up on Buddhism, it always struck me as the most tolerant of all religions. There is no harm in Buddhism. You can continue being a good Buddhist when you're going through a faithless patch and still you'll be producing good karma."

This struck her most forcibly in her early, heady days in Hollywood. "Everything was coming on so strong that, although I had preferred having only a loose connection with my religion, I realised I was losing my faith very fast by not finding enough time for it. What I needed was a church. I needed to join up. I needed to be a member of something for a while."

The person who pointed her in the direction of a particular Buddhist sect was her hairdresser on the set of The Colbys. "I think everyone is a little tender at six o'clock in the morning, don't you? So a good Buddhist is nearly as effective at that hour as a set of Carmen rollers. The combination of both was dynamite."

A conversation with Stephanie Beacham is a bit like a roller-coaster ride without the sudden stomach-clenching swoops into imagined oblivion. Her rich speaking voice delivers an almost non-stop outpouring of thoughts, hopes, fears and anecdotes. She is a confident woman now, she says, and it shows. She never ducks or deflects a tricky question; she never appears to avoid saying what she really thinks.

She is explaining why this very English woman, with two daughters being schooled in the country of her birth, should not only choose to live on America's West Coast but actively enjoy it. "I was making The Wolves of Willoughby Chase in Prague and I had flu. I hallucinated Malibu." She roars with laughter. "I hallucinated this absolutely wonderful, curly endive salad and palm trees and the blue, blue ocean. I longed to be back there." So Hampstead Heath exerts no pull? "Ah, that's more subtle, more deep-seated. If I were told I could never come back here, that would be real misery."

But Malibu is where she wants to be for now. "It's full of very famous people, which means I don't get noticed. That's lovely. With Dustin Hoffman, Sylvester Stallone and Goldie Hawn living on the same street, who's going to care about me? You get no Brownie points for wearing make-up or dressing well. It's a very casual place. And, of course, I'm still knocked out by the idea that I can live by the seaside and go to work in the movies."

Sometimes, she says, the separation from the children can be "a terrible hell" and there was a time when the girls tended to cling together a bit, like orphans in a storm. "Now they healthily hate and healthily love each other." And holidays, wherever mother happens to be at the time, are always great fun.

Their father is the actor John McEnery (he and Miss Beacham are long divorced), so it's a fair bet that one or other of the girls will want to follow their parents into the acting profession. Stephanie Beacham rolls her eyes to the heavens. "I think they're going to be grotesquely talented and Phoebe is also a very proficient painter so she's doubly cursed. At the moment, I'm rather more interested in her getting over seventeen per cent in her next maths exam, which is all she managed last time." She tries to sound strict but she's fooling no one.

The girls, by turn, have made it clear to her that on visits to their school they "don't want to see Sable arriving; they want to see Mummy as she really is."

Not that she's knocking Sable, though. "Oh, no. Sable Colby has been very good to Stephanie Beacham." She's interesting, too, on the motivating forces of that monster. "I tried to depict her as someone who was totally together externally, but seething in the middle. Funnily enough, it was Imelda Marcos with her ridiculous shoe collection who gave me the clue to Sable. She couldn't see that she was doing anything wrong.

"So I played Sable as someone who really thought she was right and someone who could get terribly hurt. She was evil, but she didn't know it. She was so selfish, so self-absorbed, yet she couldn't see it." Sounds rather like Alexis. "Not at all. She knew she was naughty. Sable always had the motive of love. She did everything for her husband and her children. That went a bit adrift when I moved across to Dynasty, but I'm proud of what I brought to the part in The Colbys."

Working with Charlton Heston helped. "He is quite brilliant. I adore him." Her latest leading man, she says, is rather different. "He's three. I'm a nun in a new series called Sister Kate. It's a comedy. And timing comedy with seven small children is a nightmare." Not a happy experience, then? "Let's just say that the nineteen I've now done have not lived up to the promise of the pilot... I always thought I was rather a nice person until I became a nun."

Her most fervent wish right now is that she should never be a nun again. If her prayers are answered, she's not sure what she'll do but, at forty-three, and with a record of varied work behind her, she's not fearful.

"My sister Di Di, who lives in Connecticut, said to me the other day: 'They'll find you out soon and send you back to Barnet.' I know what she means because the whole starry end of the business is ludicrous. On the other hand, after all this time, I do have a very solid work-kit. If I'm not a great artist, I am a good technician. I turn up on time. I understand how it all works. I've been doing it for so long."

The fledgling Stephanie Beacham, like so many little girls, had wanted to be either a ballet-dancer or a show-jumper. "I didn't know whether it was going to be toes out or toes in. I was utterly devoted to Dame Margot Fonteyn and Pat Smythe."

In the event, her utter devotion to an actor boyfriend at the Liverpool Everyman turned the teenage Stephanie on to the theatre, where she successfully auditioned before later winning a place at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in London. She didn't quite complete her course there. "I left a term early. I thought: 'Well, what are you waiting for?' I had seven agents interested in me. And then, one day, I looked up at the Gold Medal board and, apart from Anne Bancroft, I didn't recognise a single name."

The ambitious and pretty young actress launched herself on a non-stop career in theatre, films and television. Indeed, there has only ever been one period - of six months - when she didn't work. It immediately preceded her starring role in Connie, the popular series set in the world of fashion. The reason for the break could not have been more alarming.

"The details don't matter, but there was a nasty muck-up in the hospital at the end of a chain of problems and I developed gangrene. The wonder of that experience," she says now, and it is not said lightly, "the wonder is that I died."

She remembers it quite clearly. "I can see it now. I remember that feeling of passing through, of seeing brilliant white light. I remember knowing, strongly and absolutely, that we go on when we die. In no way was it frightening. It was beautiful and benign. It is as vivid to me now as child- birth. It was an extraordinary, amazing experience."

Because she was pulled back from the very brink of death, her attitude to life underwent a radical change. "I had never thought I was very good as an actress. Then with this dying business, it occurred to me that, as I'd been allowed to live, I ought to make something of anything I might have. Any small amount of talent was God's gift to me. I could either ruin it or I could look after it."

That she chose to opt for something as mass-market in its appeal as Connie, strikes her in no way as a contradiction. "Connie was fun. I loved doing it. I deliberately chose it as part of my mending process."

But surely her track record until that point had been pretty respectable. "Not really. I've done some terrible films. I've done some good theatre. You could write a biography of me that would look pretty swish. Equally, you could write a biography, choosing different things I've done, and it would look pretty sleazy."

Either way, out of Connie came The Colbys. Stephanie Beacham could scarcely have been less interested in playing Sable. Exhausted from her work on the fashion series, she only eventually agreed to attend an audition for the part because she happened to be in London at the time and her agent was pressing her.

"Then a funny thing happened. I walked into the place where I was to audition and I smelt a smell that took me a moment to recognise. It was adrenalin. It was fear. I looked around and there were rather a lot of well-known actresses, each carrying three or four changes of clothes just in case and a wicked voice in my head suddenly said: 'Go for it. Get it. Grab it.' Rather like Connie, in fact. I hadn't bothered to learn any lines. But it wasn't to do with that. It was to do with an attitude, a tilt of the chin. So I went for it. And got it."

Because a funny sort of fame settled on her long after she'd learned the ropes, she took Hollywood in her stride. It's why the woman sitting opposite is unrecognisable from the painted, pampered creature in the small-screen soap. "But dressing up is fun," she says. "Don't let anyone tell you otherwise."

The person who, more than anyone, added to that fun was the dress designer on the series, Bill Travilla. The man who designed everything from Marilyn Monroe's famous white halter-neck dress in The Seven Year Itch to Linda Gray's padded shoulders in Dallas has become a firm friend. Their happy working relationship has now spread over six collections which Miss Beacham has modelled for Littlewoods Home Shopping.

"Bill knows about women. He knew about the extra inch on Marilyn. He knows about the wrinkle under Joan's arm. And he understands that, by cutting the cloth differently, he can bring out the very best in a woman." Ask her if she enjoys the business of being a photographic model and she gives a broad smile. "Do I enjoy working and not having to learn my lines?" The question is rhetorical.

It's an interesting time for Stephanie Beacham. At the beginning of a new decade, the future must look bright. So what now is her lifeplan? "Same as anyone's in terms of health and fitness and awareness of our environment and our abuse of it," she says.

"Professionally, I think I must do a couple of pieces of work that I'm genuinely proud of. I'm not saying I'm ashamed of what I've done so far bur it would be nice, when people stop me in the street and pay me a compliment about something I've been in, not to have to cringe before I thank them."

Being Stephanie Beacham, she doesn't flinch when it comes to her private life. She is on record as saying that if she ever married again, it would have to be to someone she regarded as her best friend. "Well, as a matter of fact," she says, "I have a very good best friend right now.

"Steve and I have been together for three years. He's very shy, but in no way stupid; and we laugh a lot. We suit each other very well. He's a cameraman, but we'd never have got together if we'd met at work. We met through friends on the beach and, well, I think they call it falling in love, don't they?" She gives a funny, private smile.

There have been other men in her life since the break-up of her marriage, but none of those relationships was strong enough to overcome her spiralling celebrity. It can't be easy being known as Mr. Stephanie Beacham. "Right. In fact, Stevie went away from me at one point for several months when he feared he was going to lose his identity.

"I missed him so much - and he did me. There was a lot of pride involved before we got back with each other again. But then I think having lost him and missed him has meant that these last two years, when we've been together all the time, have been very precious. To split up with someone and to come back together is pretty miraculous. I can't look into the future too much, bur there are good foundations there."

Steve is ten years her junior "which doesn't make him a toy boy," she says defiantly, "but he hasn't got any children and that does worry me. It's one of the reasons why I don't want to get married to him at the moment. If we're still together when he's forty and I'm fifty, we might or might not decide to marry. Bur a young chap of thirty-three may not be in the best position to know whether he wants to have children or not."

She drains her coffee cup. "I'd much rather Stevie wasn't younger than me, you know, but there he is with his dark curly hair and, well..." And for the first time in nearly two hours, the sunny, funny Stephanie Beacham allows her voice to trail away as her mind goes back to Malibu.