Private Tamzin on parade

Jeans-clad, a hanky to her cold-ridden nose and her eyes glued to children's cartoons on telly, at first sight Tamzin Outhwaite is the antithesis of a leading lady.

But appearances are deceptive. Tamzin is one of TV's most popular actresses, as well as a successful model and, by the most conservative estimate, a self-made millionaire.

She's made the cover of Vogue as one of its most powerful women in television, hangs out with stars such as Nicole and Natalie Appleton and regularly appears in polls of the world's sexiest women.

Now she's all over our screens starring in the second series of the critically acclaimed BBC drama Red Cap as Sergeant Jo McDonagh, a steely but sexy member of the Royal Military Police.

She's just signed up for another lucrative year as the face of Avon cosmetics, at a rumoured £250,000, and is considering a host of other television and theatre prospects.

And by the time you read this, she will be in LA, where she is spending the next month investigating the possibility of a Hollywood film career.

'I'm 33, and that makes it very tricky,' she acknowledges. 'I'm up against the Jennifer Anistons and the Halle Berrys who, aside from being the most amazing-looking-people in the world, are already established. But I'm prepared to give it a shot.'

Tamzin has always made success look effortless. 'I have friends who I would class as just as talented, if not more talented than me, who haven't worked for a long time and I can't work out why,' she says self-deprecatingly.

She claims it's because she's lucky; but what really makes her stand out is her gritty determination to succeed. 'I find it hard to accept myself, and I push hard against my limitations,' she says.

One example is her ruthlessly professional approach to her work. For a single scene in Red Cap, a crime drama set on a British military base in Germany, she taught herself to strip down and reassemble an SA80 rifle and a pistol with a blindfold on in nine seconds.

'I probably didn't have to learn it to that degree,' she admits, 'but I was a bit perfectionist about it.

'I thought, "I want to get this completely right, so when we shoot it, the only thing that can go wrong is the technical stuff."'

She colour-codes her scripts as soon as she receives them, to make sure she learns the scenes in the order in which they are being shot; even her leisure time is organised.

'If I've got nothing on, I need to set myself a little plan: Monday I'll do this, and Tuesday I'll do that. I can be quite hard on myself when I let things slip.'

Her formidable drive has meant that since winning the role of man-eating Melanie Healy in EastEnders in 1998 (whose lurid storylines included kidnap, two marriages and an affair with her best friend's husband), she hasn't taken any career break.

But in September, she decided to tell her agent that she wasn't available for work. 'Red Cap took 17 weeks to film, I was being picked up at 5.30am and getting in quite late, and I had more scenes to learn for the morning.

I was doing 18-hour days sometimes,' she explains. 'Towards the end of that job, I started thinking I'd like a break to regroup, get my radiator fixed, all those domestic things which go out the window

So now she's sitting at home in her smart, minimalist Crouch End flat (valued by the tabloids at £600,000, though she says 'I wish!') and facing an empty diary, torture to one so keen on routine.

'I suppose I've been quite brave,' she says. 'I don't have anything that's definitely coming up.' There is, of course, more to this decision than mere exhaustion.

Last year was not a happy one for Tamzin: while her career continued to flourish, her personal life hit rock bottom. Her boyfriend of two and a half years, the DJ now MTV presenter Steve Ellington, who became famous as Ali G's sidekick Da Force, left her in the summer.

Their relationship had been a stormy one and they had split up before, but in recent interviews Tamzin, notoriously wary of letting slip any detail about her relationships, admitted to being 'very happy' with him.

The break-up was, by all accounts, unexpected and she was left brokenhearted and depressed. 'For a while, I was in a bit of a black hole and I wasn't sure how to go about getting out of it,' she says.

What made it harder to cope was that, at the same time, her parents' marriage was ending after 33 years. Little wonder if she thought the foundations of her life were collapsing.

'I felt like the solid people around me, the ones I classed as my support network, were falling away. But the dust has cleared and my parents are both still here for me.'

And her boyfriend? 'That needed to happen,' she says firmly. 'I'd always felt very strongly that it wasn't for life. There was more to it than him dumping me.'

They are, she says, no longer in contact. This is unusual for Tamzin, who prides herself on remaining friendly with her exes (who include Marty Benson, a TV producer, to whom she was engaged; there's also gossip about a fling with Jamie Theakston).

But it's clear that she thinks Ellington let her down badly. Surprisingly, she thinks the experience has been good for her.

'It's important to have a time when your confidence is knocked and your ego is checked; suddenly you realise you're not invincible,' she says.

'I've always been really lucky and spoilt in love, and for a long time I've been wanting to pinch myself because it was too good to be true.'

She's feeling a lot more cheerful now, despite having just gone through the novel and unpleasant Christmas familiar to the offspring of divorcés (spending the day driving around Essex and the East End to spend part of it with her father, part with her mother and part with her aunt).

'It just means you can't drink anything,' she says, putting a brave face on it.

She refuses to criticise her parents' decision to part. 'I still think 33 years is pretty impressive for a marriage,' she says.

You'd think, though, given that length of time, they could just as easily have carried on? 'I know,' she says. 'But I stayed out of their reasons.'

Both experiences have left her warier of relationships, she says. 'But I'm determined not to let them damage my openness.

Last year was my annus horribilis, but I'm not bitter about it - it was a massive eye-opener. It made me realise how much I enjoyed hanging out with my girlfriends and having some time on my own.'

And, of course, it didn't hurt that, after a few months of singledom, she met Jamie Baker, a handsome 26-year-old professional snowboarder who manages a winter sports team for the fashionable sunglasses company Oakley.

They've now been dating for a couple of months, but Tamzin is shy about discussing it.

'You want your relationship to evolve naturally,' she explains. 'I don't even know if I'm calling him my boyfriend.' Which makes it all the more unfortunate that a Sunday tabloid photographer recently snapped them in a passionate clinch outside her flat.

It's not the first time she's been caught snogging on her doorstep - last year, pictures appeared showing her cuddling Nigel Harman, who plays EastEnders heart-throb Dennis Rickman, and you do wonder why she doesn't do it inside with the curtains closed.

But Tamzin doesn't see why she should. 'Who cares? The main thing is not to let that sort of scrutiny run your life.' She finds the tabloids' obsession with her love life funny rather than distressing.

'I just read in another paper that I've said I'm in love with him,' she giggles. 'Which isn't something I'd admit to anyone except myself.'

Any man who wants to date Tamzin has to expect such scrutiny, she says. 'It comes with the job, it's bound to happen, though I can't believe it's that interesting and important.

But Jamie and I are both single and we've got nothing to hide. He's got no history, however far they dig, and we're both quite confident about the relationship.

'We'll see if he does have the temperament to cope.' She looks confident that he will.

Tamzin was brought up in Loughton, Essex, in a laid-back, Arsenal-mad household. Her father Colin was a taxi driver and now runs a videorental business; her Italian mother Anna is a financial adviser but was, for a while, an Avon lady, a period Tamzin remembers with fondness and which formed part of her decision to agree to the cosmetics contract.

It was a chaotic but happy childhood for Tamzin and her two brothers, Kes, 30, a physiotherapist, and Jake, 23. 'We were easy come, easy go. There was always an open door for any friends I wanted to bring home.'

The only rules were bed at nine and attendance at school, but Tamzin, being the driven creature she is, wishes she had been pushed more.

'Up until I was 13, I was quite academic, but I let it slip because I found acting more exciting. I would have liked to have learnt languages and some kind of musical instrument.'

Similarly, she clearly found her parents' tolerance of domestic chaos something of a trial.

'Organisation was the very last thing on everyone's list,' she says in her husky, estuary accent.

'There was no such thing as routine and we were notorious for our unpunctuality. I was late every day for school because my mother never dropped me off on time.

'When I was sent to convent school, I couldn't be late, so I'd take myself on the bus and arrive 40 minutes early. I got a bit anal about it. It all gave me a sense of needing routine.'

It's a desire which has stayed with her ever since; as has the instinct to perform which also asserted itself in childhood.

One of her earliest memories is standing in front of the television in her tutu during a Cup Final to make sure her father watched her perform her ballet steps.

At 12, she was convinced her future lay in acting and begged to be sent to stage school. Her mother insisted she stay on at school to take her O levels, so Tamzin lied about her age to join a youth theatre group and then, at 16, went to the London Studio Centre, became head girl and won the prize for the most outstanding all-rounder (previous recipient: Liz Hurley).

There followed eight years of hoofing it in musical theatre, including appearances in Carousel at the National, Grease and Oliver! She moved on briskly as soon as each contract came up for renewal.

'I felt, "It's done, it's on my CV, now it's time to move on." And I quite like the experience of leaving and not knowing what's going to happen to you. There's that buzz about feeling, "What next?" '

Finally, she ended up in Scarborough, singing in the chorus of Alan Ayckbourn's production of They're Playing Our Song. Impressed, Ayckbourn offered her the lead role in his own Absent Friends.

'That's what gave me the confidence to call myself an actress rather than a musical theatre performer,' she says.

'If you can sing, dance and act, you're kind of overqualified. People don't take you as an actress because they see you as a "twirly" '.

She finished one Ayckbourn run at the end of June 1998, auditioned for EastEnders on 5 July, and found she had the job on the 8th.

At first, it was a three-month contract; that was constantly renewed and by the time she left she had been a mainstay of the show for three and a half years.

During that time she grew accustomed to being approached in supermarkets, receiving sackfuls of fanmail and winning polls as Soap's Sexiest Actress.

For many soap actors, the regular work, the high profile and the money are simply too good to give up.

Tamzin being Tamzin, though, she always had her exit strategy in mind and, when she felt her character had no further to go, appalled her fans by turning her back on Albert Square.

The stage is still set for her to return and she says she won't see it as a failure if she has to; but you bet she won't.

'I felt very elated and very free when I left,' she confesses. 'There's nothing like being able to choose whether to do a job or not.'

She immediately set about ridding herself of the slight stigma that attaches to soap actors, turning down the gangster's molls she was offered because they were too similar to her Mel Healy role.

Instead, she gave gritty performances in Out of Control, an award-winning film about a dowdy single mother, Final Demand, a two-part BBC drama where she played a swindling account clerk, and, most surprisingly, a desperate and dowdy young brunette in Flesh Wound, a hard-hitting drama at the Royal Court.

'It's never been about money for me,' she says. 'It's about gaining new experiences.'

Which is why she's now heading for Hollywood - not in search of fame and fortune, but just to see if she can do it. And while the nearest most East Enders get to Hollywood is the Romford nightclub of that name, Tamzin undoubtedly has the determination to conquer the real thing.