Maneater Miss Redman

Their eyes met, in time-honoured fashion, across a crowded room. Amanda Redman, overtly sexy in a clingy designer dress, knew instantly that she 'had to have him'.

Her prey, Damian Schnabel, would take a little persuading. He was, after all, engaged to the daughter of one of Miss Redman's girlfriends. But once Miss Redman had made up her mind, Mr Schnabel, as one friend puts it, 'didn't stand a chance'.

Three years later, Mr Schnabel is still under the spell of Miss Redman, one of the best-known faces on television today, star of the highly acclaimed and hugely popular At Home With The Braithwaites, and the Oscar-nominated film Sexy Beast, alongside Ben Kingsley.

In the early Eighties, Miss Redman caused a sensation when she appeared in a lesbian love scene on television with the Swedish actress Liv Ullman. She has also portrayed the sensual screen icon Diana Dors. And, as it turns out, Miss Redman's private life is every bit as racy as many of her on-screen roles.

Take her seduction of Mr Schnabel, for example. First, the feline aquamarine eyes, made-up to perfection, bore into his. Next, she moved alongside him, seemingly carelessly touching his arm with her own. Finally, she began to entrance him with her notorious feminine charm.

It took just a few minutes before Mr Schnabel, a marketing designer for Virgin, was hopelessly smitten.

Within three weeks they were a couple, his fiancee having been brutally cast aside.

And so it was that Miss Redman had ensnared yet another toyboy.

For this is not the first time Miss Redman has shown herself to be something of a man-eater. Past conquests include Oliver Boot, a schoolboy still in his teens, and, by way of contrast, one of her teachers when she was a 15-year-old schoolgirl, who was 32 and married with a child.

Not to mention a former husband, two violent former lovers and an early, passionate affair with Dennis Waterman, then just separated from his wife and conducting a very public affair with Rula Lenska.

Tangled does not come close to describing that situation.

Talking about 30-year-old Mr Schnabel, Miss Redman recently quipped: 'There's only a 12-year age gap this time,' a reference to Boot, the 17-year-old student who attended the weekend drama workshops that she runs in Ealing, West London.

Arithmetic, as it turns out, is not Miss Redman's strong point. These days usually referred to as 42, she is, in fact, 44 - which makes an age gap of 14 years.

To her credit, Miss Redman does not look her age. But then only a person with her youthful looks, energy and vivacity could get away with going out with a 17-year-old boy, then 22 years her junior, and not be mistaken for his mother on every outing.

For Mr Schnabel, her interest must be highly flattering. After all, she is a talented beauty who has both fame and riches. But what, one wonders, is in it for her?

According to friends the answer lies quite simply in her 'high libido'.

'She is a very sexual person with a high sex drive,' says one. 'She places great importance on the physical side of a relationship.'

Another reason Miss Redman enjoys the company of younger men is that it enables her to bring out the 'motherly' side of her character. 'She's a sensual woman, but there's also a strong nurturing side to her,' says the friend.

'She frets and fusses over her men in a motherly way - that's one of the reasons she likes younger men. They, in turn, adore her.

'She is also very feminine, so her predatory ways aren't threatening. The combination of her mothering and high sex drive is deadly - men really respond to the two very different sides of her character.'

A few weeks ago, three years after they began dating, Mr Schnabel moved into the actress's £400,000 home in West London.

Miss Redman was photographed with him carrying a case of wine to the house while looking decidedly unglamourous in baggy black trousers and slippers. Mr Schnabel, meanwhile, was content to make the trip to the off-licence in jeans, T-shirt and socks but no shoes.

All the signs, then, of cosy domesticity. So will Mr Schnabel be the man to finally tame Miss Redman? Friends say she certainly hopes so.

'Amanda is madly in love with Damian and is telling everyone he is The One,' says a friend, 'although Amanda is one of those people who falls head over heels with everyone she's involved with and gives herself heart and soul.

'She says Damian is a soulmate, and one of the things she loves about him is how he makes her laugh.

She would really love to get married but he is slightly more reticent about it. He wants to be sure that when the passion dies down they still feel the same way about each other, and he would like to give it a bit longer.

'Although Amanda is quite aggressive sexually in many ways, she is also very old-fashioned in others - an eternal romantic. She has had a very colourful love life, but she is also a great believer in love and marriage. It just so happens that she sometimes picks unsuitable men.'

Indeed. But then from the very beginning, Miss Redman's life has been, as she herself says, a 'soap opera'.

Throughout it all, Miss Redman has been centre stage, the dazzling star in the soap that has a more riveting plot than any film, play or television series she has ever appeared in. And she has a long list of TV credits, including On The Line, To Have And To Hold, Hope And Glory and Dangerfield.

The first big drama in her life happened when she was just 18 months old. While at her grandmother's house, she suffered severe burns after accidentally tipping a cauldron of boiling soup over herself.

As a consequence, she was to spend her early years constantly in and out of hospital, enduring one agonising skin graft after another.

The legacy of the accident is a scar which runs from her shoulder down to her elbow, and which she has never made any attempt to hide.

As a result of having to spend long periods cooped up at home recovering from surgery, she turned into a hyperactive child. Hoping it would help burn up her excess energy, her parents enrolled her at a local drama class in Hove, East Sussex, where she was brought up. The little girl was hooked.

Drama class was a welcome diversion from her troubled home life. Her father, whom she worshipped, was a conman and womaniser who had numerous affairs.

'Although everyone is insecure to a degree, Amanda is probably more so and is afraid of men doing what her father did to her mother,' says one friend.

Insecure about men she may be, but that hasn't stopped her from taking her chances with them.

Her first love was a music teacher at her school who accompanied the 15-year-old Amanda and a group of her friends on a school trip to Russia. Mesmerised by the vivacious beauty with the long blonde hair, he left his wife and child for her.

Only when Miss Redman's horrified parents intervened did the affair come to an end.

Amanda's father, who spent three years in prison for fraud, became gravely ill with leukaemia when she was just six, and eventually died when she was 21, leaving her and her mother heartbroken.

But by now, she had a successful life of her own: she was well on the path to fame, having won a place at the prestigious Bristol Old Vic drama school.

She left there in 1979, and in 1981 met and fell in love with Central Television floor manager Francesco Reidy. They were together for about a year.

At around the time of their split, she met Dennis Waterman, whom she was starring with in the West End musical Windy City.

At the time, Waterman's affair with flame-haired Rula Lenska was making lurid headlines in the newspapers. What nobody knew was that he was also conducting an affair with Miss Redman.

For years, Miss Redman kept uncharacteristically tight-lipped about the affair, but a couple of years ago she admitted that they were lovers and that Waterman was probably 'the second most important man in my life'. Runner-up, one imagines, to Mr Schnabel.

It petered out after about 18 months, presumably as Waterman's affair with Miss Lenska, whom he later married and divorced, deepened.

But whatever happened between them in the early Eighties, Miss Redman was determined it would not interfere with her career which was beginning to gather pace, helped by her decision to do a lesbian love scene with Liv Ullman in the TV drama Richard's Things in 1983.

An inevitable notoriety followed. But off-screen, things were always at least as, if not more, exciting.

The following year, Miss Redman married actor Robert Glenister, two years her junior. Both were thrilled when she gave birth to daughter Emily, who is now 14. But the marriage, sadly, did not last.

It was put under intolerable strain when Miss Redman suffered an ectopic pregnancy, the first of two, in 1991. The couple split up the following year and later divorced.

She said afterwards: 'It took me a long time to trust anybody after Robert and I split up. Our relationship began as a friendship and then we fell in love. But the pressure of us working apart so much destroyed the friendship that we originally had. A friendship needs to be nurtured and once that had gone we weren't left with anything.'

Miss Redman's next big romance was Nick Caunter, an actor, whom she lived with for a few years.

In 1996, she had a brief fling with Maurice Phillips, director of the BBC series Beck, in which she starred. But it wasn't until the following year that the real-life soap opera really took off and began to grip the nation.

Miss Redman's love life became the focus of the tabloids' rapt attention, with the revelation that she was was seeing Boot, then 17 and a student at her Saturday drama classes. She was 39.

When the affair became public, Boot, who ditched fellow student Natasha Gonella for Miss Redman and soon afterwards dropped out of sixth-form college, was an object of both envy and admiration among his drama school colleagues who couldn't believe he'd succeeded in 'pulling' their sexy but mature teacher.

Miss Redman met with a different, entirely cynical reaction from her friends and family. 'She was ridiculed when it came out, but to Amanda it was water off a duck's back,' says one friend. 'She leads her life the way she sees fit, and if people don't approve that's their problem.'

But she was undoubtedly in love with Boot who, despite his tender years, had a reputation for being 'confident' with women. But the age difference between them was brought home after Miss Redman, who would dearly love to have another baby, suffered a miscarriage - one of several she has had over the years.

'When I lost the baby it became apparent to me that Ollie, who'd been so brave and supportive throughout it all, was too young to deal with it.

'It was probably the saddest, worst time of my life. But it was a beautiful relationship and we really loved each other, so I don't regret it.'

It was Mr Schnabel who provided the proverbial shoulder to cry on. The age gap - 14 years - was minor in contrast to the 22-year age gap with Boot.

Now living with Damian, Miss Redman still holds out hope that she will have another baby. Although with her history of ectopic pregnancies - she is patron of the Ectopic Pregnancy Trust - and miscarriages, and her age, she realises it may not happen.

Marriage to Mr Schnabel is what Miss Redman is hoping for now - an uncharacteristically tame ambition for someone like her, given everything else that has happened in the great soap opera that is her life.