'My personal life was a disaster'

The omens were not propitious. The writer who was supposed to interview Jenny Seagrove was indisposed, and I was understudying at short notice, which meant a quick gallop through the cuttings - enough to log messy divorce, eating disorders, tabloid-titillating relationship with Michael Winner and recent success on the telly. Seagrove's perceptive springer spaniel, Louie, was reluctant to let me into her home in London's Little Venice and, when I sat in one of the hammock-style garden chairs while she made me a cup of tea, two of the ropes holding it together snapped. How much worse could this get?

Happily, not much. Seagrove, plugging her new play like a trouper and surprisingly open about the ups and downs of her personal and professional life, was the perfect host. She quietened her dogs (Louie has a new friend called Millie, recently rescued), said the ropes of the hammock had been weakened by rain, and forgave me for knowing little about her beyond the five-year liaison with Winner.

Do people - other than me, that is - still harp on about Winner? "They do when they want to be nasty," she says. "They write, 'Jenny Seagrove, former squeeze of Michael Winner.' It has such connotations. He was great fun and made me laugh a lot, but I hated getting out of these big cars and going to premieres. I used to say, 'Michael, I really don't want to do this,' but he'd say, 'I've got to go and you're my partner, so you've got to come.' You do these things if you're in a relationship, but it was very damaging because I was seen as a publicity-seeking bimbo."

The late 80s and early 90s were disastrous for Seagrove. Success in Local Hero and A Woman of Substance had seemed to promise stardom, but the collapse of her marriage to Indian actor Madhav Sharma debilitated her, the relationship with Winner made her a figure of fun, and the film that in 1990 was supposed to mark a fresh beginning, The Guardian, directed by William Friedkin, served only to depress her career further.

"Everybody was terribly excited," she recalls. "I was out in Los Angeles and the phone wouldn't stop ringing. People wanted to manage me, they wanted a bit of me, and it was actually hateful. We finished the film and there was a screening at Universal in a huge movie theatre. Everybody went, there was great excitement, the film started, and within 10 minutes you could feel the temperature in the room dropping. They all knew that it wasn't going to work. It has become a cult film, but the screenplay was appalling. It was being written on the hoof.

"It was about this druid nanny who became a tree. I begged Universal to make it about a real nanny who kidnaps babies. 'No, no, we can't do that,' they said, 'the thirtysomethings in America won't come and see the film.' I said, 'I think you're completely wrong; this film is total fantasy, and it's just awful.' Two years later The Hand That Rocks the Cradle was released, so I rang up my friend at Universal and he said, 'Don't. Don't even talk about it, you were right.' "

Seagrove links her career dip to personal problems. "I'm not going to throw the blame at anyone," she says, "because I believe in taking responsibility for my own decisions and I made the wrong decisions. But things went pear-shaped, and my personal life was a disaster." She means the relationship with Sharma, and their highly public divorce, not her time with Winner. Indeed, she traces the start of her recovery to her relationship with the larger-than-life film director turned restaurant critic.

"I was changing all the time I was with Michael," she says. "I went to therapy when I was getting divorced. I realised you either have to learn to walk, or you sink. With Michael, I had to learn not only to walk but to run; to stand up and exist in my own right. So, in that way, being with Michael was good. I was forced to grow as a person."

Therapy teaches you to make the best of everything, and Seagrove has learned the lesson well. She reckons that if the career hadn't dipped and she had, as once seemed likely, taken America by storm, it could have been worse. "I would probably have gone to Hollywood and imploded. I was a little bit fucked-up emotionally, and for me to have had a huge amount of success very early on could have been quite dangerous. If that had happened, I wouldn't be sitting here now." Seagrove likes where she is now sitting - and not just because the hammock-like chair with the rain-weakened straps can support her lithe frame. Since 1994, she and theatre producer Bill Kenwright have been an item, and he seems to have given her all the confidence she previously lacked. "He totally believes in me as an actress and as a person," she says. Older men, protectors as well as partners, have been a theme in her life, but in Kenwright she seems to have found one who provides the necessary security without attempting to control her.

Life, sitting here in the sun, feels good. They share this gorgeous house; she adores her dogs and Everton, the football club of which Kenwright is chairman; she works for charities - animals, children, the elderly and the environment - and campaigns for organic food and alternative medicine; and, best of all, her career is back on track. Six years playing lawyer Jo Mills in BBC1's Judge John Deed have given her "a nice little television career", and she and Kenwright have collaborated on several stage productions, the latest of which, Somerset Maugham's The Letter, opens this week.

"Maugham's incredibly underrated," she says. "I did The Constant Wife about four years ago. It's a wonderful piece, and was a huge success. I'm hoping that was the start of the Maugham revival, and that The Letter will be a continuance." She describes this much-filmed tale of the wife of a Malaysian rubber planter who murders a local playboy and then pleads self-defence as a "whydunit rather than a whodunit", and says it is a cracking story. The twilight-of-empire setting has a resonance for her, as she was born in Kuala Lumpur and spent much of her childhood in the far east.

She is aware that working with Kenwright leaves them open to charges of nepotism, but has her response well honed. "He happens to be my partner, but we work well together. He trusts me; I trust him. So when you're in that situation, why shouldn't you work with someone? I think I've earned the right to hold my head up by now."

Seagrove is grateful to Judge John Deed for getting her back on TV and reminding people that she is an actor, not a rich man's accessory, but is pleased, too, that the programme is about to have a break. "We're taking a little sabbatical," she says. "They want to do more, but we need to stand back from it a bit. Martin [Shaw, who plays Deed] and I both feel it needs changing in some way. I think we'll probably do some more; it's just what format they take - whether it's episodic or we do specials, and whether we shake up the formula. That formula has been very successful so one is loath to change it, but you know if you don't change it, it won't move on."

Seagrove, perhaps inspired by Kenwright's entrepreneurialism, is becoming more active in developing her own projects. "I've bought a stage play that I've had rewritten as a screenplay. It's set in Iraq and is about media manipulation by the army. It's a fascinating piece, and I think it would make an extraordinary film. It's hard to get a film going, but I'm going to have a go. I've also got another writer doing some treatments for a series for me. I'm trying to push the boundaries a bit."

Seagrove is 50 this year, though she refuses to confirm it. It's a tricky age. As she says, "you have to make the transference from leading lady to character, and that's hard." But the lost years of the late 80s and 90s have given an unusual arc to her career, and provided her with a different perspective.

"I think I'm getting into the golden years," she says. "Of course, it may all stop. But that is the wonderful thing about acting. It's like a big sack of sawdust. You put your hand in for Santa Claus's presents and you get ... 'Oh God, I hate dolls' and you throw it away. You put your hand in again, and there's that little painting that you always wanted. It's round the corner all the time."

· The Letter opens at Wyndham's Theatre, London WC2 (0870 950 0925) on Thursday