My life is like a soap

It only hit Kacey Ainsworth how famous she actually was when she recently went on holiday with her family. Aside from the normal autograph hunters and gawpers, Kacey was rather disconcerted to find that some people, thrilled at seeing East-Enders' Little Mo Slater in their midst, were videotaping her when they thought she wasn't watching.

"They were taping me while I was lying on the sun lounger, dribbling sweat and suncream," she says, "and I mean I couldn't bear it after a while, so I had to cut short my holiday and come home.

She mentions all this not out of arrogance but purely, you suspect, out of sheer amazement that her fame has reached such heights. This time two years ago you probably would have struggled to pick Kacey out of a police line-up, but this year, with her touching portrayal of the downtrodden wife of evil Trevor Morgan, her fame has soared.

Kacey's story lines were so emotive and her performances so harrowingly real that Erin Pizzey, veteran campaigner for battered women, was moved to comment that EastEnders had done more to highlight the issues of spousal abuse in two years than she herself had done in 25.

As a fitting reward for her efforts, Kacey has won four awards this year, including Most Popular Actress at the National TV Awards. And as she herself concedes: "This year has been amazing for me professionally."

When Little Mo first appeared in Albert Square as part of the evertroublesome Slater family, she was the one who made the least impact - the tiny-voiced sister with the permanent stoop and appalling taste in cardigans, constantly in the shadow of brassy Kat and fishwife Lynne. But it is a huge testimony to Kacey's ability as an actress that she has managed to take Little Mo and turn her into one of the most watchable characters in TV soaps today.

Meeting the 34-year-old actress, therefore, is a bit of a shock. Slim but voluptuous, loud, vivacious and in possession of a rather earthy turn of phrase, hearing Little Mo swear is as much a shock to the system as hearing Phil Mitchell utter terms of endearment.

"But I love Little Mo and I love playing her," Kacey insists, "although it is a whole new departure for me to play someone constantly on the back foot, because as you can see, I'm not like that. I'm very chatty and outgoing, whereas she is a person of great kindness and I have to struggle to find Little Mo's kindness in myself!"

A huge part of the character's appeal is her sweet vulnerability, and although Kacey laughs off any suggestion of similarity between the two, she undoubtedly brings a great deal of heart to Little Mo, formed no doubt through her own, sometimes soap-like experiences. Eating disorders, alcoholism, cheating partners and immense personal trauma have all played their part.

Recently it was announced that Kacey and her fiancè, Darren Hales, were expecting their first child, only for it to be revealed last month that Kacey had lost the baby little more than two months into the pregnancy.

The pain, understandably, is still raw and although she says that it is too personal to talk about, she hopes that they will try again for another baby in the future. " Obviously, the last couple of months have been very difficult," she says softly, "but we'll be fine."

The stresses of adjusting to her newfound fame and Kacey's increasingly heavy workload might possibly have taken their toll, but, she says: "Obviously, you have to change the way you conduct yourself. You take your work home with you less and you learn to deal with the stress a little better."

Kacey and Darren were devastated by their loss, and she took time off work to be comforted at home by her fiancè - her former childhood sweetheart. (They'd split up when she found him cheating on her in the back of a Ford Cortina, but recently got back together.) In fact, Darren, a plumber, sounds like a bit of a rock, not only helping Kacey through this period, but also being the one to help her through a difficult patch in the late Nineties when she suffered from anorexia. It was when Darren broke down in tears and told her that she was wasting away in front of him that Kacey vowed to conquer the illness.

The seeds of the condition were sowed when Kacey was just nine and appearing in the West End musical, Annie. Kacey was told she was too fat to sit on a fellow actor's shoulders and was immediately put on a diet. That comment clearly stuck in Kacey's mind, and she said it led to her anorexia when she was in her late twenties. "To hear I was fat at that age made me very aware of my body image when I was really too young to deal with it," she says. "There were times during my spell in Annie when I was unhappy, but everything makes you the way you are, so I can't say I wished that period had never happened.

"As I got older, the problems really started. I over-exercised, under-ate and weighed myself constantly. I basically turned into a stick insect with boobs." Now, although still slim, Kacey looks extremely healthy. "I'm glad to say that my problems with food are pretty much over," she adds.

Food, by Kacey's own admission, turned into an obsession and as she readily admits, she is prone to obsessive behaviour, be it food, work or whatever - behaviour that she admits was evident from her childhood. One of two daughters, Kacey was brought up in north London by parents, Ted, a businessman, and Hazel, a housewife, and although it was a happy childhood, it is perhaps telling that her father was an alcoholic and thus also prone to obsessive, addictive behaviour.

"I suppose you could say I inherited that obsessive gene," Kacey admits, "Only I went down that line with food rather than alcohol. I'm also very driven workwise and have just realised that you have to channel your energies in the right direction.

"You can trace alcoholism back through my dad's family, but he was never an abusive drunk; he was a funny drunk who just used to fall over a lot. And my mum was such a solid force in the family that I don't think it affected me badly at all. He is a wonderful father though and always encourages me and my sister Suzanne in everything we do. He was always jolly, never aggressive, but just decided for his own reasons to become sober. So he went to the AA, did the 12-step programme and cleaned up. He hasn't touched a drop for 12 years now and I'm really proud of him."

Both Kacey's family and friends have, she says, become even more important to her as her profile has grown. "When you get into this business and have a bit of success, everyone thinks you're going to swan off and hang out with celebs the whole time," she says, "but really, it just makes you value the people around you a lot more.

"The level of interest in me because of EastEnders has come as a bit of a shock, and the Sunday papers are phoning up ex-boyfriends, offering them money to sell their stories, which is just so weird. But it's really made me value my true friends and I'm learning to live with all this stuff - I think.

"There's also a great responsibility attached to my character. I get loads of letters from women in a similar situation to Little Mo - with violent and abusive partners - and all you want to do is help them. But on advice from trained counsellors, we were told we couldn't enter into correspondence with them because even if we were to send them something little like a signed photo, that could trigger violence off in their abusive partner.

"I do support a few charities and open refuges and have even launched a domestic-violence helpline for Hertfordshire Police recently. The scary thing is, I could be doing things like this six days a week. But I feel a responsibility because of my screen persona and the best way I can fulfil that is by playing Little Mo to the best of my abilities.

"Now my huge workload has reached the point where I've had to put my personal life on hold a bit. Everyone seems to be saying that me and Darren are to marry next year, but that's news to me. If we both had the time to organise the wedding, I'd marry Darren tomorrow, but our lives are so chaotic at present, I can't even organise a drink around my house, let alone anything else.

"Friends keep offering to organise it for us, but I want it to be our wedding. Darren would hate it to be huge though - he accompanies me to events, but he is a very private person. He keeps me sane.î

Sanity, though, is not a quality much in evidence in the Slater household, and as Little Mo prepares to marry Billy Mitchell in the Christmas episodes of EastEnders, you can be sure that the wedding will be fraught with difficulties. Kacey, on the other hand, is planning a quiet Christmas with her family - Darren, dad Ted and mother Hazel. "Mum isn't too well. She needs a kidney transplant and has to have dialysis treatment, but she's okay because she's so strong. She's a coper and she'll be all right."

Somehow, you feel that whatever problems life might fling in her path, that is pretty much the attitude that Kacey has towards them, too. She's a coper; she'll be all right. Just like Little Mo, in fact.