How Cherie's still Cutting It

Cherie Lunghi is talking sex. "Zinnia's the last thing any girl needs as a mother. She loves sex and power. She's less interested in emotional involvement. She's in it for the physical pleasure. She sees herself as an educator, someone performing a public service - and she's indiscriminate about who she'll target. She's a monster."

And, of course, huge fun to play as is obvious from the second series of Cutting It, the larger-than-life TV saga of scissor-unhappy folk. Zinnia is mother to Amanda Holden's Mia and yes, says Cherie, as her character Zinnia was and is sexually precocious, it is just possible that Amanda could be her daughter.

We meet in Cherie's south-west London home. At 51, and after a switchback career, she is content, and adamant that getting older is "fabulous", likening it to playing tennis. "The longer you do it, the more technique you acquire and that makes the game easier."

Even so, for a celebrated beauty, time can be unforgiving. "Do I care about the effect on my looks? Yes, a bit. But if I walk down the road with my daughter, it's now Nathalie who turns the heads, and that makes me feel proud. Anyway, I've had my fair share of wolf whistles.

"With age," she says, "comes a greater wisdom, an ease and comfort with oneself. I'm not about to become a fading, alcoholic beauty who feels there's no longer any meaning to life. Anyway, I would like to think my self-worth is based on rather more than how desirable I am to the opposite sex."

There is no one special in her life at the moment. "And I happily leave it to fate. I don't live each day thinking that, unless I find a man, my life is deficient." But don't get her wrong. "There'll always be the space if someone were to turn up, but if no one does, it's not going to be a catastrophe. My God, I've had so much love and experience in that department. You won't hear me complaining."

Cherie has been married once - briefly, many years ago - to a fellow drama student. Her subsequent eightyear relationship with director Roland (Killing Fields) Joffé foundered when their daughter, Nathalie, wasn't yet two.

"Roland made it clear he was going to settle in America and I realised we weren't destined to walk the same path.

"I have been a single parent for a long time now. It always reminds me of being a waitress. As you walk back to the kitchen, requests come at you from all sides. You're doing the job of two. So you have to become an efficient forward-planner." And she is very proud of Nathalie, 17 in August, who may well follow one or other parent into the profession.

"The trouble," smiles her mother, "is that she first noticed what I did for a living when things were running smoothly." These were the years of The Manageress and the Kenco coffee ads. "She never knew my waitressing years."

When she was treading water professionally in Britain in the mid-1990s, Cherie upped sticks and, with Nathalie in tow, decamped to Los Angeles. "I felt I would run out of challenges. Britain felt stale - the Tories were still in power - and I was hungry for something fresh."

Four years later, and after a successful TV series, Moloney, she returned home. Hollywood was out of her system, but there were personal reasons, too. Her elderly mother, Gypsy, was fading. "I wanted to be with her at the end," says Cherie, "especially as I'm an only one."

Her parents had divorced when she was a toddler, her father, Alessandro, moving to the Italian quarter round Warren Street. "I didn't see a relationship between a man and a woman, with all its daily ups and downs. The result in regard to my own relationships with men has been a little bit like working without a map."

Still, she doesn't appear to be lost. "But I am sure I wouldn't feel this great now if I hadn't encountered hurdles along the way. The trick, I discover, is to be happy to live in the moment, something that has taken me half a century to achieve. And, very soon, it's going to be Cherie's turn. I think I've earned it."

Cutting It is on BBC1 on Tuesdays at 9pm.