STILL Game star Gavin Mitchell is one of the most upbeat, glass-half-full actors you could ever meet.

STILL Game star Gavin Mitchell is one of the most upbeat, glass-half-full actors you could ever meet.

But that's in spite of a personal life story that makes Angela's Ashes read like a fairytale.

Gavin, now 44, reveals his parents split when he was just eight and his mother remarried. But his stepdad, John, died when Gavin was 12.

Then Gavin's dad, Kenneth, died just a year later. And the heartache was heightened with the realisation his dad hadn't been allowed to play a major part in his life.

"My parents got divorced when I was young and after the split my mum didn't want me having anything to do with him, which was really sad because he was a great bloke.

"My dad loved the theatre and he took me to my first shows. And he was a projectionist at the cinema in Coatbridge. I remember watching the first James Bond film with him. And I guess he introduced the world of entertainment to me. My dad had opened my eyes."

Soon after the death of his dad, Gavin's world blew up completely. His mum Edna "went out for a pint of milk and never came back".

Gavin, who now lives in the West End of Glasgow, had a big brother, Kenny. But Kenny lived in London.

"I suppose if I had been older I'd have seen it coming," he recalls of his mum's disappearance, maintaining an upbeat voice.

"There had been times in the past when she'd go off with one of my uncles'. But the debt had been mounting up - I learned later it was into thousands - and she just disappeared."

Gavin survived for five days by eating every can of food in the house but he faced being taken into care. Then fate stepped in. Kenny tore some cartilage in his knee and came home and decided to take care of his little brother.

"Kenny argued with the local authorities that he could take care of me," says Gavin.

After months of wrangling and talking to social workers, Gavin was allowed to stay at home. But it was a tough time for both of them.

"He was quite hard on me," says Gavin, smiling, with obvious understatement in his voice.

"Not quite as evil as the character I play in this new Taggart episode, a gangster called Drydon who has a hold on DI Ross, but he'd be hard on me."

What was the worst Kenny ever did to maintain discipline?

"I couldn't even tell you the fourth worst thing Kenny did to me," he says.

"Having said that, I do appreciate what my brother did for me. He put his life on hold to make sure I was okay."

Both brothers were deeply affected by the disappearance of their mother.

"We used to follow women in the street who looked like her," says the actor, who shot to fame as Boaby in Still Game.

The brothers worried constantly. "The guy she had been seeing was really dodgy but we kept up this hope that we'd see her again one day."

Gavin did see his mum again. About five years later in 1983, now 18 and living in Glasgow, the teenager was walking down Mitchell Lane - and suddenly he saw her.

"She had really aged and she was with one of the uncles' right enough. So I followed them into Sammy Dow's pub. And even though I didn't drink I was so nervous I ordered a whisky at the bar and stood drinking it and staring at her. She didn't recognise me at all.

"Then I planked myself next to her and she looked at me and said, casually, Hiya, son!'"

Gavin discovered his drink-dependent mum was living in a flat in Glasgow's Otago Street.

"It was weird. I wanted to know all about her. But I remember I didn't tell her where I lived. It was as if I wanted to remain in control.

"Anyway, she gave me her address, and I visited her once to check she was okay. And as I was leaving she pressed a pound coin into my hand - for sweets'. It was as if I had never grown up in her eyes."

Gavin tried his hand at several jobs before becoming a successful actor. (He's set to star alongside Ford Kiernan in new BBC sitcom Happy Hallidays.) There was no real happy ending to his mum's story however, although Gavin did see her just before she died.

He certainly hasn't spent years feeling sorry for himself.

"You know, I think my determination to succeed in acting also had a lot to do with proving a point. I guess what I was doing was saying Look, I CAN be successful, mum!"'

• Taggart: Grass, stv, tomorrow, 9pm.