Tamzin Outhwaite plays Mel, the tarty, neurotic barmaid in EastEnders. As soon as you see her, though, you can tell she is nothing like Mel. She's a practical, sporty girl from Essex with a lot of nervous energy. She sits up straight in her seat and has the movements of an ex-dancer, which she was.

She likes diving and snorkelling. Her stomach, revealed when she stands up, is toned and deeply tanned. There is no ring in her navel. Mel, she says, is 'more wired than me, more flirtatious' and even 'a bit schizo'. This sometimes worries her. Unlike Mel's, Outhwaite's speaking voice is pert; to do Mel, she says, she 'slackens everything. I don't pick up my Ts. I say, "Wha' you 'avin'," rather than "What are you 'avin'".' 

Outhwaite gives off the air of somebody who knows she needs to be absolutely in control. Two years ago, she was an unknown former dancer who had landed a part in a soap opera. She had no idea how big the part would grow; now she's one of the most popular actresses in the country. She's also a sex symbol. Men like her because she operates in their universe - you don't see her swanning into premieres like Liz Hurley. She goes to premieres, certainly, but she doesn't swan. As a TV presence, she feels attainable and looks down-to-earth as well as pretty. But she knows that things could change at the drop of a hat. If she has one too many drinks, she knows she might find herself compromised in the tabloids before she's got rid of her hangover. Worse, if Mel has one too many drinks, Tamzin might be in trouble. Tamzin believes, in an almost superstitious way, that her popularity depends on Mel's. 

Being in EastEnders, she says, is hard, draining work. At work, she needs therapy. Between scenes, she often dips into a self-help book, Don't Sweat the Small Stuff, to 'have a little moment'. 

Because Mel is the barmaid, Outhwaite has very little time off - she must be in at least one scene, and usually several scenes, in every episode. The workload must be stressful; she does not consider herself a smoker, but has taken to scrounging from other cast members between scenes. 'I didn't smoke a whole cigarette until I was 28,' she tells me. She is 29.

We are in the restaurant at the Great Eastern Hotel in Liverpool Street. Outhwaite wears a Nicole Farhi headscarf, even indoors, because she loses a lot of heat through her head. 'As soon as my head's warm, I feel a bit comfy and snuggled.' She wears trainers and patterned Maharishi cargo pants.

'There's this wave of Maharishi at the moment. Every time you open a paper someone's wearing them. I said to my wardrobe mistress, "Is there any chance that Mel might wear a pair of these?" And she said, "No, Tamzin. That's you. That's not Mel. And we've got to keep them separate, haven't we?'

What if Mel turned into a bitch? This is a genuine worry. Outhwaite, who has been nominated for a National Television award, tells me that some members of the EastEnders cast, including Adam Woodyatt, who plays Ian Beale, and Steve McFadden, who is Phil Mitchell, are often overlooked because their characters are perceived as nasty. I suspect she worries that, if Mel turns bitchy, her career might suffer. 

'I've been Mel for two years,' she says, 'and she's been through what a normal person would go through in ten.' Mel, for instance, has fallen in love with a murderer and jilted Ian Beale at the altar. She is already beginning to fray around the edges.

Unlike the previous generation of soap actresses, particularly Martine McCutcheon, Outhwaite very definitely does not want to become a pop star. 'I'm too old,' she says. 

Having acted and sung in several West End musicals - she was Patty in Grease - she wants to 'shake off' her reputation as a singer and dancer. As a girl, her parents thought she was tone deaf. But then she went to the London Studio Centre and 'learned to sing adequately'. 

Best bar none: Tamzin shows us she's got what it takes

She looks you in the eye when she talks. What she wants to do eventually, she says, is 'raw, gritty drama'. One day, she will have to give up being Mel but she'll have to do it at exactly the right time. She doesn't want Mel to cling on for too long, like Ethel.

Outhwaite orders chicken and a glass of wine. She tells me she was lucky to have got the part in EastEnders in her late twenties, 'Because I feel I've done my years of partying or whatever. I don't think I would have coped so well at 22 or 23.' 

She lives in Snaresbrook, in the small flat she has owned for years, with her fiancé, the TV producer and presenter Martin Benson. Last Christmas, on holiday in Madagascar, they decided to get married. But she reckons she'll put the marriage off for a while. 'With the amount of publicity and attention that EastEnders gets, it's almost impossible to have a day like that as private.'

When she was a child, her parents, who are both from the East End, kept moving around Essex. She was born in 1970, just when Mum and Dad were 'coming out of their hippie phase'. Her mum was 19, Dad drove a black cab. With two brothers, she grew up feeling boyish. 'I'm not a very girlie girl,' she says. 'I'm not very good at grooming.' 

She slices a mouthful of chicken, and chews it with polite vigour. She thinks, then says, 'It takes a lot to get me into my heels.' On the other hand, on the occasions when she does get into her heels, she goes to town. 'The last time I dressed up, I had my hair curled,' she says, 'and one journalist said I looked like a man in drag.' 

She is gritty enough not to mind. Also, her childhood toughened her. 'I loved my upbringing,' she says, 'because there was no routine. My parents had a history of moving into derelict places and doing them up, and staying there for a bit, and selling them just when they were done, and then moving somewhere else.' 

Her father currently has a business delivering videos door-to-door in a van. But she loves being able to help out financially. At Christmas, she says, she will take her family and her boyfriend's family 'and anyone else who wants to come' on holiday to Cape Town. 'No,' she adds quickly, 'I don't mean, "anyone reading this".'

She left her convent school at 13 because of poor academic results. 'I just desperately needed to... I didn't feel I was doing brilliantly there.' Outhwaite talks about this with no regret whatsoever. 

People say she looks like Susan George. Actually, she looks like Susan George would have looked if she'd been a professional tennis player. She has none of Susan George's languor or wistfulness. She looks capable of anything. At the moment, she says, she's learning how to strip furniture. 

As a teenager she was pretty, but not particularly glamorous. Not as glam as Louise Lombard, who is 'classically gorgeous', and has been a close friend since the girls met at the age of four.

Acting, she says, is hardest when she has less to do and she finds her main problem is being over-prepared. She likes it when things get raw and instinctive, when her own control becomes frayed. She loves the scene when she stormed away from Ian Beale at the moment of marriage. 'I lost it,' she says, 'and got rid of his arm and screamed, and suddenly my voice went up about eight pitches, it was really high and shrieky, and normally if we'd have prepared that I wouldn't have probably let it get to that. But it was natural and it was raw and it was better, I think.'

She's not like a soap character herself. The most dysfunctional thing about her is that she's messy. She has problems with housework; she'd rather come home, learn her lines, and spend some time bumming about. She still keeps fit. Sometimes she slips into feeling a bit 'plodgy. Like porridge. When you're not feeling snatched, and your muscles don't feel tight.' But as a former dancer, she knows the exercises to do. She has the optimism of the taut-bodied and is clearly resilient; she can deal with 'the bullshit that you encounter if you are making an hour and a half of telly a week, really intensely, really quickly, and your private life is quite public. You have to check in occasionally and say, "It's all all right.

This is all right. I'm actually enjoying it".' 

She stands up to go. She is lean rather than 'plodgy' and her stomach is bronzed because she's just been filming a programme about dolphins. She loves dolphins, 'but I'd have done it if it had been tarantulas'. She's hungry for opportunity. She's great as Mel but let's hope she leaves at exactly the right time. 



Tamzin is 100 per cent genuine and as level-headed as anyone could be considering that three years ago she was a nobody and now she's the most watched, gossiped-about and lusted-after woman in Britain. 

When we're introduced, Britain's highest-paid soap star (according to the Sunday Mirror, but see below) is stuffing a sandwich into her mouth in some sort of EastEnders common room. She asks Sharon, EastEnders' dedicated PR, for coffee, decides to make that a Diet Coke, and then, when it comes, wonders why there's no sugar for the coffee. 

As I say, Tamzin is as unditzy as the circumstances permit - but the circumstances currently include two photographers on 24-hour watch outside her flat in South Woodford. The EastEnders shooting and transmission schedule is unfathomable to mortals. 

I see Outhwaite on the Friday evening before last Thursday's showing of Mel's wedding, yet her face is heavy with fake tan, the residue of Mel's still-to-happen honeymoon in Jamaica. She's just shot a scene from her return, but only because an episode had underrun. Her main scene of the day is from even farther into EastEnders' future and it's her heaviest in ages. 

"I can't actually tell you the ins and outs because it would give too much away," she says, "but it's Martin Kemp [who plays her husband, Steve Owen] and myself, crying, and it's a five-page scene. I haven't tackled a five-page scene with just two people for quite a long time. Then we do this scene which is completely the opposite. After all the crying and dragging through every single emotion, we go to a kissy, laughy, lifting-me-over-the-threshold kind of thing ..." 

Playing Mel must be like being in the grip of manic-depressive mood swings the whole time, I say. She says it absolutely is, although on some days, like today, she'll resort to a little dab of tear-stick to encourage the ducts to flow. "Sometimes you almost feel that with all the emotions you go through on the screen there should be an on-set shrink just to help you get out of character so when you finish you can go home and lead a normal life." 

The Rev Alex Healy's sister arrived in Walford in October 1998, an unknown quantity to all. "What I really liked about it was, when we started looking for costumes, the wardrobe department couldn't quite fit where I was going. I'd wear Army pants and trainers some days and then jeans some other days and then I'd be all suited and booted at other times. I said, 'That's what girls do! That's how I am. Some days I'm in scruffs and some days I'm really dressed up. It would be really nice to have a character who's not so predictable.'" 

Today she is wearing a Jaeger oatmeal jacket - Mel's, not hers. Her hair, which also varies its height, is worn down. At 30, Tamzin looks younger than Mel, mainly because her mouth turns upwards at the edges more often than Mel's. Out of it come vowels less Estuary than hers, but only slightly. 

To begin with, she says, she would learn her lines weeks in advance, consider Mel's motivation from every angle. The difficulty is that modern soaps render such analysis virtually irrelevant. There are no weeks of rehearsal in which to forge characterisations. 

Actors are cast as versions of themselves and then left to the mercy of different teams of writers and directors. To add to their burden, they often have to half-replicate hit partnerships of the past. As Outhwaite points out, Mel's relationship with Lisa - friends who hang out together yet sleep with each other's men - echoes Sharon and Michelle's in the early days and Tiffany and Bianca's later on. 

But the greatest casualty of having the ratings lead the plots is character consistency. Take Phil Mitchell, the once harmless brother of violent Grant Mitchell. He's now the toughest skinhead in town. A priceless moment in Mel's dialogue spelled it out last week. Mel to Phil: "When did you turn into your brother, eh?" Phil to Mel: "About the same time you turned into a two-faced slag." 

Lesser actors give up and let their characters live in a continuous amnesiac present. Tamzin, however, takes her job seriously and has wrestled to wed Mel's sophisticated, cosmopolitan backstory - the Greek Islands, a stall in Camden Market, a spell as a married man's kept woman - with stories which have landed her with four moronic bedmates, all of them neighbours. Her solution has been to make Mel a chameleon. 

"When I arrived I liked the idea Mel was feisty and strong. I didn't want her turning into a wimpy character like so many women in soaps. You know, they're either bitches or they're slags or they're victims. I wanted to give Mel a bit of everything. Every woman has all those elements to their character. It's just working out where they come and go, and I don't think that's lack of continuity; I think that's a three-dimensional character." 

However she has done it, Outhwaite has made Mel one of the most credible characters in the programme. Within a year of joining she was voted Most Popular Newcomer at the National Television Awards and has subsequently won a sexiest soap actress award twice and a best female personality prize. 

Not wanting Mel to become another Cindy Beale, Outhwaite has also managed, despite the sexual betrayals, to keep women viewers rooting for her too. The result was that 17 million of us watched Mel wed Steve last week (although, Phil's shooting was an equal attraction). 

Success, however, makes its own victims. The goose that lays the BBC's golden eggs will become a battery hen, later this year, when EastEnders steps up to four episodes a week. 

"I'm a strong believer in quantity not quality," Tamzin says. "I mean the other way round. Quality. Quantity. Quality. Whichever it is." 

I say I'll tidy her quote up. "Please do. No, what I think will happen is there will be a larger cast and the actors' story lines will be spread out more evenly. People who haven't been in a lot lately will have more to do." 

The price Outhwaite has personally paid is having her love life made public. At first this was easy. At around the time she joined, she fell in love with Marty Benson, a junior producer at the independent production company, Action Time. 

Tamzin spoke enthusiastically in interviews of Benson being that rare thing "someone you fancy, who makes you laugh and is your best friend". Two Christmases ago they decided to marry - just as Mel was embarking on one of the shortest marriages in soap history. Although she says she never considered wedding Benson while still on EastEnders, the prospect of real-life nuptials pacified Fleet Street. Towards the end of last year, however, Marty and Tamzin split up. 

It was reported that she blamed EastEnders. "I never said that, ever. That was a complete misquote. We, as an item, blamed our separation. We spent all of the last year apart. It wasn't EastEnders. It is a difficult industry and you have to take work where work is. There is no blame on anybody, no animosity. It was a conscious mutual decision. Mutual." 

Besides, she doesn't owe us explanations. Since the split, however, the pack has become much aroused. When I see her, the stake-out of her flat is in its fourth day. "It goes through phases. Normally it is when Mel's story lines hot up but now I am single they are just trying to find something out." 

Who the next man is, presumably. "Yes, or they try to accuse my friends of having an affair with me. But that's their job. They need to sell newspapers and, at the moment, EastEnders is hot." 

At least the set is some kind of haven. Beyond the manned gates at the end of the lot, there is the company of sympathetic actors. Away from the studios, her strategies for calm include spending time with family and friends she saw less of while living with Marty (although the papers will insist they're dates), classical CDs in the morning and a half hour's yoga at night. 

"Just recently I've really started mastering the art of laughing my head off at it all." When, the day before, the Daily Sport ran a picture of her head on someone else's naked body, she assured worried friends that she just thought it ridiculous. 

She didn't ring her lawyer? "Oh no. I mean, it's just not worth it. That's their job and as long as I'm in this programme, I'm sure I'll be tabloid fodder. But it also has its great side because it brings in a lot of viewers." 

My instinct tells me this acceptance has been rather harder won than she lets on. Fortunately, she is exhilarated by her fame too, proud that David Bailey took her portrait for the cover of Radio Times. Her overnight success took a decade and is properly appreciated. 

She was brought up in Essex by her father, Colin, a sacked printworker turned cabbie, and Anna, who was only 20 when Tamzin was born, and has taken various jobs, including running a children's clothes shop in Brentwood and working as a financial adviser. Although she says four years at an Ursuline Convent School instilled discipline in her, she was not particularly academic and, at 16, not bothering to check her O-level results, she enrolled at the London Studio Centre to train as an actor. 

A talent for song and dance - she has an athlete's body-fat ratios - led her into West-End musicals, from Grease to Sam Mendes's production of Oliver!. There were bit parts in The Bill and Men Behaving Badly but nothing to stretch her dramatically until Sir Alan Ayckbourn spotted her in a chorus line and gave her a big part in a revival of Absent Friends in Scarborough. The play gave her a "new-found want and desire to act" and Ayckbourn cast her again in Baby on Board. Days after finishing touring with it in the summer of 1998, she went for the EastEnders audition. 

Her speech, which is never exactly hesitant, gathers pace when she describes the unexpected phone call that awarded her the part without even a screen-test. "I'm thinking, you know, I'm going to have to audition at least seven times for this because I auditioned six times for Oliver!, you know, six recalls just for the rose-seller, so when you're playing something where they're really relying on the character, I expected to keep coming back." 

She stops dead. "Shall I talk a bit more? Suddenly I had a guilty conscience that I was hanging out with a friend and I was just monopolising the whole conversation." At such moments, you wonder how she ended up playing such a dour, beetle-browed old cynic as Mel. I hope when she leaves EastEnders it will not be for a gritty social realist drama by Paul Abbott or for some Sunburnt whimsy, but for comedy. 

And when will that be, anyway? She says she is not yet "raring to leave". She's here for the experience and - let us not say the money - "the immense security financially, and the immense amount of confidence and faith in the future" the exposure buys. 

How immense is "immense", I ask. Last summer's papers said she had signed a new £120,000-a-year deal to stay. "That's rubbish. The papers were saying I was the highest-paid person in a soap." 

So the sums were wrong? "Nowhere near. I mean, the figures they quote - I don't know where they pick them up." 

In fact, as we speak her contract renewal is being negotiated. Nine days later, the Sunday Mirror splashes over its front page that the BBC is increasing her salary "by £130,000 to £280,000". Who knows? The accompanying estimate that with other work she'll make £1 million this year is surely trashily OTT. But if her real pay is smaller than the papers believe, it doesn't matter. 

The truth about Tamzin Outhwaite is that she is one of those occasional soap actors whose personality is larger than the character she plays. Long before the soap bubble bursts, she'll have busted out.