ACTRESS Lysette Anthony is not the type to dodge the bullet of accusation.

The Londoner, back in Glasgow next week with Agatha Christie's Go Back For Murder, once looked set for a glittering Hollywood career.

Yet after landing big screen roles the rocket fizzled out - and Lysette is more than happy to explain why disastrous marriages tend to eclipse shooting stars. They are also exhausting and expensive and have to be recovered from."

Lysette, who once starred in Auf Wiedersehen, Pet and the BBC sitcom Three Up, Two Down in the 1980s, was married to Dutch actor Luc Leestermaker for the first half of the 1990s and later to American film director David Price.

More recently, she lived with composer Simon Boswell, with whom she has son, Jimi. But the relationship ended in acrimony.

"At least when I die my obituary will be a colourful one," she says, grinning. "And if my big failing in life is I didn't become an international movie star it is pretty far down the totem pole of what is important."

Her life has certainly been colourful. Her parents, Michael Anthony and Bernadette Milnes, were actors.

Lysette was 10 when she made her first stage appearance at the Cambridge Theatre. Four years later she performed with the National Youth Theatre. Her looks - she is now 50 and still stunning - appeared to be her passport to success and she was once heralded as the Face Of The Eighties by iconic photographer David Bailey.

Yet, as she was developing a career, her family life was a mix of traumatic and chaotic. Her mother was schizophrenic and a manic depressive. The young Lysette did not know whether she would come home to face a fun mother, or an angry, sobbing, frightening creature.

After her parents split (her mother met a new partner) Lysette did not see her father for five years. She was then packed off to boarding school to cushion her from reality.

As she grew up, Lysette admits she tried to pretend her mother was not suffering from mental illness. And this denial certainly impacted upon her own life - and career.

"I have been employed continuously for most of my career, but often dismissed," she admits. "I would come across as a bit two-dimensional and I think that was because I had a secret, which was that I was protecting a very mad mother.

"Her dying has been something of a release for me. I think my mother died of shame because she could not talk about her illness, but I do not suffer from that any more."

Last Lysette's 82-year-old once beautiful and successful actress mother, who had appeared in more than 50 films and TV series, burnt to death in a freak accident at her home in Norfolk.

"For six months after her death I had this image of my mother burning to death very slowly. Then I was told she'd had a heart attack. But that time was hell," says Lysette.

Mother and daughter's last conversation took place while Lysette was in rehearsals for her current play.

"It was a long run, and I had been unsure if I could commit to it. I had been offered the part while I was with her that afternoon in Norfolk, and she wanted to check I had taken it. She said: "You have to do it", then told me she loved me."

That was the last time they spoke.

However, Lysette maintains she is so happy she agreed to appear in the play.

"This is one of the jobs I have had I'm really proud of. And the likes of Lisa Goddard and Sophie Ward have become great friends. We have all had our day in the sun so there's none of that ego stuff going on."

The plot of Go Back For Murder centres on daughter Carla Le Marchant (played by Ward) who, stumbling upon a letter from her mother who died in prison after seemingly murdering her husband, sets out to prove a miscarriage of justice.

Lysette plays Lady Elsa Greer, the murder victim's youthful mistress.

"It's a murder mystery, but this play is all about sex," she says. "It's a hotbed of frustration and betrayal."

She adds, laughing; "We have all lived these lives, just a few degrees down. "Well, I have anyway."

l Go Back For Murder, Theatre Royal, November 18-23.

"It's because I have made such bad choices in men," she admits. "Rather