SIAN PHILLIPS reveals how she was romanced by Peter O'Toole and fell victim to ...

She is one of Britain's most brilliant actresses who is still, aged 88, winning rave reviews for her latest West End role. 

Now, in the first extract from our exclusive serialisation of her reissued and updated memoirs, Dame Sian Phillips reveals how she fell helplessly in love with the charismatic Peter O'Toole — and how their marriage began to be corroded by his drinking and obsessive sexual jealousy . . .

One night, in the early hours, I was woken by a noise coming from the ground-floor window of my front room in Notting Hill. I got out of bed without putting on the light.

Improbably, there was a face pressed to the glass and a tall figure perilously straddling the gap between the window and the steps to the front door.

I raised the sash slowly and two hands plunged in to seize the window frame. Then, with a heave, two long, slim feet swung down to the floor, and over 6ft of Peter O'Toole sketched a little bow.

I wanted to applaud. At the same time, I was astonished: we'd become close friends after acting together in a play, but had fallen out spectacularly.

I had innocently repeated to a friend something he'd told me about a former girlfriend — and when O'Toole found out, he had reacted with such fury that I never expected to see him again.

'I've got a car,' he said now. 'Coming for a cup of tea?'

'It's three in the morning.'

'So?'

'I'm in my nightie.'

'Put a mac on.'

That was the start, in 1958. We were in our early 20s and had no trouble adjusting our living habits to suit each other.

I'd never stayed up late, but came to love it. And he began to enjoy seeing the world in daylight hours — streets and parks as well as the dark interiors of bars.

The only slight difficulty was drink. Before meeting O'Toole, I'd never tasted beer, let alone whisky. I realised quickly that an appreciation of draught Guinness was essential in my new life and persevered, sipping the hated drink slowly during evenings when O'Toole drank his own age in the stuff.

Everyone we knew drank so much; incredible quantities of alcohol were lowered on every conceivable social occasion. Coming from a nonconformist, teetotal Welsh background, I was cautiously intrigued by the guilt-free, amusing nature of drinking to excess.

It was easy living together — and with wonderful sex thrown into the mix, it was ecstatic. While I played lead after lead in live television plays, O'Toole was in Willis Hall's The Long And The Short And The Tall, his first big London success.

After the play, the company would move to the bar next door. When the pub shut, there would be a muttered conference and a large part of the crowd would drift off to parties in basement flats, then hit the after-hours clubs.

The fag-end of the night was my favourite part. The two of us would walk to the all-night tea-and-sandwich stand in Covent Garden and order huge mugs of tea and hot-sausage sandwiches, which we ate sitting opposite Lloyds Bank.

Fortified, O'Toole would say, 'OK. Now for a little climb,' and he'd scale the wall of Lloyds.

The first time he did this, I was terrified and tried to dissuade him. But in a remarkably short space of time, I came to accept his dangerous behaviour as fairly unremarkable and would sit on the low wall with the tramps, nursing my tea, watching him.

He was sure-footed. And lucky. The regulars knew him as 'Pete' and gave him a little cheer as he finished the descent.

In our bedroom one day, O'Toole looked at my wardrobe of good clothes and said, 'You look as though you're in mourning for your sex life — all this black and violet. Give it here.'

It was late at night and raining as he gathered up armfuls of organza and wool, bags, shoes, gloves, frocks, hats and suits and, opening the window, flung thousands of pounds' worth of clothes on to the wet cobbles below.

I had a momentary pang of regret. 'But what will I wear?' I asked.

'My clothes,' he said grandly, gathering me into his arms.

So we became the only couple in London who shared a wardrobe. Winter and summer, we wore cotton trousers, canvas shoes, lumberjack shirts and big knitted fisherman sweaters. I had to roll his trousers up, of course, which made me look like a waif (he looked like a handsome pirate).

O'Toole's friends didn't approve of me. They felt his free spirit was being sucked into a conventional relationship and, with no special ill-will towards me, tried to put a stop to it.

I didn't mind. They weren't to know we had a new kind of equal partnership and that the last thing I had in mind was domesticity — as alien to me as it was to him.

My friends, advisers and employers were equally appalled and bluntly said that he would destroy my career, trample all over me.

They must be mad, I thought. I was deliriously in love. What could possibly go wrong?

During a break in Ireland in 1959, O'Toole suddenly clutched me and said, 'Have my children.' I instantly said, 'Yes.'

Five weeks later, it dawned on me that I must be pregnant. It turned out there was a conventional side to O'Toole after all: although he never proposed, he kept saying, 'We must arrange this marriage.'

Our wedding in Dublin was essentially an excuse for a p***-up. From pub to pub, we criss-crossed the city that night, gathering well-wishers. By 3am there were just five of us left, standing in a shebeen.

Was it marriage that changed him? Back in London, he would come grumpily home at night and sometimes go straight out again. Without me. Some nights, he didn't come home at all.

I knew what he was doing: he was leading the life we used to lead together, but now I was the wife and not really eligible. Nor, I realised, was he keen on me working, or at least not in leading roles.

I said nothing. All I'd ever wanted was to act — but the idea of a wife with a career, demanding rights, was laughable back then.

Then came an offer for O'Toole to play Shylock in The Merchant Of Venice in Peter Hall's new company. So in January 1960, as I neared the end of my pregnancy, we moved to Stratford-upon-Avon. We'd rented a big Edwardian house called Mount Pleasant (promptly re-christened 'Mount Unpleasant' by O'Toole).

Heavy now — and resenting it — I was surprised to find that my free spirit, my equal partner, expected me to clean the house, wash, iron, provide meals and be on parade when needed.

Drink now became a dominant factor in our

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