It was 27 years ago and she was performing at the Kings Theatre in the afternoon and evening, but in the morning she dashed to London to marry - and the following day she and her new husband caught the ferry to France for a one-day honeymoon.

He is theatre impresario Sir Eddie Kulukundis, a member of an old Greek shipping family.

They met when he went to see her play the title role in Miss Julie in London. They became friends and after seeing her in another play many years later he said he would like to take her to dinner.

She smiles: 'He ordered a bottle of wine, but I didn't drink any wine at all in those days so he had to have the whole bottle and I had to drive him home.

'He decided that evening he was going to marry me, and six weeks later he did.'

Sir Eddie was once wealthy but gave all his money away, Susan says, much of it to support British athletes including former Gosport and Portsmouth schoolboy Roger Black.

'Then one day Eddie woke up and realised he had given all his money away. But it's all better now,' says the apparently unfazed actress.

Her husband is ill now and Susan is clearly worried, but she continues to appear in The Circle at Chichester Festival Theatre.

For her, The Circle represents the completion of a personal circle.
She appeared in Somerset Maugham's play at Chichester in 1976 as
Elizabeth, a young married woman tempted to embark on an affair.

Now Susan plays Elizabeth's mother-in-law, Lady Kitty, who herself
abandoned her husband and young son 30 years earlier to run away with a politician. Her dilemma now is whether to encourage the elopement.

Susan says: 'It's a terrific play because it appeals to both the old and the young. That's very unusual, particularly in a light comedy.'
The 1976 Lady Kitty was Googie Withers. Now Elizabeth is played by Charity Wakefield, best-known as Marianne Dashwood in this year's TV adaptation of Sense And Sensibility.

'Charity is enchanting,' says Susan with typical generosity.

So, incidentally, is the older actress, as sparklingly flamboyant on stage as she seems shy and modest off it.

She plays down her own importance to BBC series Monarch Of The Glen, for example. Of the children's books she has written, she murmurs 'I can't say they're any great shakes although children seem to have enjoyed them'.

And when during the interview her mouth becomes dry, she hesitantly asks the waitress at the theatre cafe whether she is allowed another bottle of water on the press-office tab.

But when we talk about her 1973 Emmy-winning performance in Vanity Fair, she does admit that people who have seen all the various TV adaptations say she was a very good Becky Sharp.

Later versions have been more blatantly sexy and Susan admits hers was 'probably quite tame, although we had the nude scene at the beginning where Becky was struggling as an artist's model.'

By the time of Vanity Fair, Susan had also won Emmy Awards for The Forsyte Saga (1970) and The First Churchills (1971). Subsequent high-profile TV series have included The Pallisers, The Barchester Chronicles and Monarch Of The Glen.

'The two of those I enjoyed most were Vanity Fair and The Forsyte Saga but I also loved doing What Katy Did, a children's classic series before any of those.'

Monarch Of The Glen lasted for seven series and she feels it had run its course by then.

In fact the remarkable thing was that it survived for another four series after the departure of Richard Briers, who played the kilted laird and husband of Susan's character.

She points out that it kept going because it now went out at the same time every Sunday so viewing figures soared. Then Alastair MacKenzie, the new laird, left - and that was that.

But Susan says working on the series was never the same without Briers.
'He is a very big TV star and nobody will mess around with someone of his calibre at the helm. I was never in that league. He might almost slap the wrists of any youngsters who became too uppity.

'But he was very lonely and unhappy working in Scotland. He missed his family in London. It took a day to get there and a day to get back, and when you were there the midges bit you to death.'

Away from acting, Susan has used her public profile to raise awareness of the problems of dyslexia, drawing on her personal experience of the disability.

She wrote two books on the subject - the autobiographical Susan's Story, and Every Letter Counts.

Now she says her participation in the continuing campaign to achieve more and better help for dyslexics is less necessary than it was.

She explains: 'You don't need people like myself to stand up and be counted quite as much as you did 30-odd years ago.

'It was a big decision to go public with my dyslexia, because it's better to be known for acting rather than that. It doesn't do your working life any favours.

'But you have a choice in life about what you feel you should do with it, and any time I talked on television or radio the response was huge, with mothers and grandmothers writing or calling in.'

On stage, Susan has worked in everything from Shakespeare and Ibsen to Peter Pan and Expresso Bongo, and obviously such productions have required extra learning time from a dyslexic actor.

But is there also a sense in which the struggle results in a deeper understanding of the lines and the character?

'Yes,' Susan nods. 'It's upsetting to see other actors go off to the pub at night while you're still learning lines, but at the end you often find you are the one who's really solid on them.

'I remember Noel Coward and people at the National Theatre in the 1970s took the view you should know the lines really well even before beginning rehearsals.

'And if you have to work hard at it, as I do, they do become more embedded.'

*The Circle is in repertoire at Chichester Festival Theatre until August 29. Tickets: (01243) 781312.