Alma's other side

Shirley Broadbent was a precocious, unpredictable child. If she liked you, she would be fiercely loyal and protect your friendship with limitless energy; if she didn't like you, she would jump on you from a great height and beat your head on the floor until you slipped into unconsciousness.

After changing her name to Amanda Barrie she found fame as a leading lady in numerous West End hits, as Cleopatra in Carry On Cleo and Alma Halliwell in Coronation Street, but as a young girl her erratic behaviour and violent temper could easily have propelled her down a very different path.

She was born - appropriately - on a stormy Saturday night in the back bedroom above her grandmother's tailor's shop. It was not an easy birth; a fact which her mother Connie relayed to her every year on her birthday in vivid and somewhat gruesome detail. But that was just Connie's way.

Described by Amanda as someone who made Gypsy Rose Lee look like Mother Teresa, her mother had something of a volcanic personality, erupting into life whenever she had an audience. She was not a professional performer but she was an intensely theatrical woman who wanted nothing more than for her daughter to be the next Shirley Temple.

She pushed Amanda on to the stage - sometimes literally - from the age of three, and continued to push throughout her career. Even when she won a part on the biggest soap on British television, Connie still regularly phoned the Coronation Street producers asking why her daughter was not getting more air time.

"If she had not pushed me I wouldn't have done anything," said Amanda, who has dedicated her autobiography, It's Not A Rehearsal, to her mother. "It makes me gasp in horror to think what would have become of me.

"I don't think it was down to her own ambition. It was more that she wanted to show me off; for other people to be as proud of me as she was."

When her parents' marriage began to disintegrate, Amanda was unceremoniously packed off to a boarding school - a place she hated and rebelled against at every opportunity, cracking several of her schoolmates heads on the marble floor if they crossed her.

"I have never been able to understand why I was sent away," she said. "I think my mother just wanted me to be better. "That's how she would have justified it.

"I suppose it taught me to be independent from a very young age. That doesn't mean I didn't hate the place with a passion, though."

At school she found love for the first time, with an older girl who protected and cared for her, and where she first began to question her own sexuality.

She has since enjoyed several relationships with women and men, including a long and, for the most part, happy marriage, and seven years as part of a threesome, but her early years were marred by sexual confusion.

"I just didn't know who or what I wanted, so I didn't indulge for a very long time," said Amanda, who even managed to hang on to her virginity during her days in the Soho clubs, where she began working as a dancer alongside Barbara Windsor at the age of 13.

"Everybody talks about how dangerous it must have been, but it really wasn't. You've got to remember that it was just after the war - anything was better than having bombs dropped on you.

"And people were always helping me and feeding me. They were forever calling me into restaurants and feeding me Hungarian cheese - I virtually lived off the stuff."

Throughout her rollercoaster life, through nervous breakdowns, bulimia, anorexia, and sexual adventures with married men and older women, Amanda has managed to retain an air of bemused naivet.

Even when she found herself dealing purple hearts out of her dressing room to exhausted performers in need of a chemical pick-me-up, she did it with what can only be described as good intentions.

In her book she describes herself as "a mixture of hopeful innocence and weary worldliness". She has seen it all in her time, but she has not allowed herself to be corrupted by it. But are her fans, the people who think they know her through her work, equally as shock absorbent?

"I couldn't have written this book when I was still in Corrie," said Amanda. "People trusted me because I was in their sitting rooms four nights a week. I couldn't have dropped these sort of bombshells and then gone back to being good old Alma."

She now feels "a ridiculous, enormous sense of relief" that she has finally put pen to paper - a task made all the more difficult by her acute dyslexia.

"Everybody knows everything now," she said. "There are no more surprises."

Which means she doesn't have to worry every time the Sunday papers arrive on her doorstep. She can now simply read and enjoy.

"Ever since I came out I haven't been able to pick up a paper without some other performer doing the same," she said.

"I think I've started a trend darling." Amanda is now filming Bad Girls for ITV, playing a con woman who couldn't be further away from her Corrie character.

"I wanted to get right away from Alma, so I'm decked out in a long red wig," she said. "I look like Jane Asher's grandmother."

She still finds time to watch her former family - the Coronation Street crew - in action though, and, despite her initial anger at the way Alma was despatched, it seems all is now forgiven.

"I love the Richard storyline at the moment, particularly because he's after the money I left Audrey," she said. "I am so pleased that the show has picked up again and is getting better."

But doesn't it rankle - just the tiniest bit - that despite her numerous theatre credits, which include Shakespeare and Coward, she will always be remembered for Cleo and Corrie?

"Not at all," she said. "I love them both. I thank God every day that I was silly enough to jump naked into that bath of milk all those years ago."

Amanda Barrie will be signing copies of It's Not A Rehearsal at Borders book shop, York, on Monday from 1pm.

Odd facts about Amanda...

Christened: Shirley Anne Broadbent - after Shirley Temple

Hometown: Ashton-under-Lyne

Stage debut: Aged four in Grandfather Broadbent's production of A Christmas Carol. She had to sit squashed up in a small box for 15 minutes before bursting out on to the stage.

No place like home: Kicked out of boarding school at 13, she lied about her age and took up residence at the Theatre Girls' Club - a hostel for performers - and began working the Soho clubs.

Theatre Credits: Numerous, including Oh Kay!, originally written for her all-time heroine Gertrude Lawrence; Alan Ayckbourn's Absurd Person Singular; Michael Frayn's Noises Off; and Richard Harris's Stepping Out.

Cleo-mania: She still receives as many fan letters for Carry On Cleo - released in 1964 - as for Corrie.

Oops: While appearing on the first ever live Morecambe & Wise TV show, her skirt fell down during a gypsy dance so the entire television-watching public got a grandstand view of her knickers.

Royal command performance: The actor James Robertson Justice, who had royal connections, asked if she would give the then 15-year-old Prince Charles a sex lesson. She politely declined.

Persona non grata: She was banned from South Africa in the 70s for putting on a performance of Cabaret for a black audience.

Love's Labour's Lost: Former deputy leader of the Labour party Roy Hattersley declared undying love for her alter-ego Alma at the Edinburgh Television Festival in 1990, comparing her to Tolstoy's Anna Karenina.

Updated: 11:22 Friday, November 22, 2002