Brookside were wrong to kill me....

Anna Friel was shocked by Beth's final exit from the soap - but it taught her a lesson she'll never forget

Former Brookside star Anna Friel is glumly expecting a fuss. She's finally found her dream London flat and plans to leave the house she's been borrowing for the past few months. Problem is, it belongs to West end star and You bet! host Darren Day, her boyfriend of two years. so the minute she packs her bags the newspaper headlines will scream that the couple have split up for good.

"I can see it now", she groans. "When I moved down to London I wanted to get my own flat, then Darren suggested I stay at his house because he was away all week. But the moment I move, the papers will say for sure that Darren and I are washed up".

Anna - who played Brookside's Beth Jordache and appears this week in Cadfael - has only just reached 20, but comes across as surprisingly world-weary. She was at the centre of a huge TV scandal when Beth was given a lesbian storyline. It came after two years of strong drama. Firstly Beth had an affair with a man charged with rape, then she was jailed over the death of her sexually-abusive father who ended up under the patio. Although all the events were fictional, the pressure on Anna was very real. Just weeks after leaving Brookside, she buckled under the strain.

"I got ill for quite some time afterwards", she reveals. "The hospital said I was suffering from exhaustion and needed to relax. I was getting very bad headaches and my parents and I were frantic, thinking it was a brain tumour. But I had a load of tests and everything was fine. In the end it was just my body telling me enough was enough".

The Rochdale-born actress relied on those closest to her to help. "Mum and Dad looked out for me and Darren was very supportive. I think it happened because I tried to cut Brookside out of my mind too quickly". Looking back, Anna is angry about her final Brookside storyline in which she died of a congenital heart problem while in prison. It was calculated to cause maximum fuss.

"Beth being killed off certainly wasn't the way I wanted to go out. Unfortunately I had no say in the matter - you are owned by the show when you're in a soap. I was unhappy about it but I couldn't let the last two months get in the way of two great years. The experience has made me stronger and now I won't let people walk over me".

The enforced rest was the first time that Anna hadn't worked since she was 16. And she admits she was very lonely. "It was hard leaving home. I wasn't working and it was easy to get negative and insecure."

The daughter of two teachers, she got the acting bug at the local Oldham Theatre workshop. She studied for her exams while filming programmes such as Medics and Emmerdale, and passed nine GCSEs. But she dropped her five A-levels to concentrate on Brookside.

The soap, she says, was her training ground. Since leaving she's been planning out her life, "I had to spend time sorting myself out as a person. I never had time before. I want to be a renowned actress - and not just in Britain", she insists. "I want to be big and I want to be different. Jodie Foster is my role model. But I've got to do things gradually until the soap thing dies away, and people see me as an actress and not just as Beth Jordache".

despite this, in the past 12 months, Anna has chosen her roles with care - they include Shakespeare for the BBC and the latest Cadfael story, A Morbid Taste for Bones, with Derek Jacobi. "I could have worked non-stop after Brookside, but I decided to wait to do something with one of Britain's best actors". Her next part is a return to eyebrow-raising roles. In a new film, The Tribe - in cinemas this autumn - she has her first nude love scene. "It was the most unsexy experience", she giggles. "It was daunting, but I'm glad I did it because now I'm uninhibited about my body".

She hopes the role might lead to bigger things. "I'd love a Hollywood career, who wouldn't ? I went to Los Angeles for two weeks to see casting directors who'd heard about The Tribe, and was offered a contract, worth a million pounds, to star in a US TV drama serial. But it would've kept me there for five years. It's an awful lot of money to turn down but the last thing I wasn't to do after Brookside is get into another long-running serial. I really want to make films out there and I think that's worth waiting for".

Boyfriend Darren, who she met two years ago, has yet to see The Tribe. His squeaky-clean image is very different from Anna's. Yet she insists their differences keep them together. "He's very giving, very gentle", she insists. "We love each other very much although we don't put any expectations on the relationship. But I'm at the stage of my life where I want to concentrate on the positive rather than the negative. And Darren is a very, very good part of my life".

Fiona Knight