SUSANNAH York admits that she didn't have to go very far to research the role of actress Esme Allen in Amy's View.

The character, she says, is very much like her.

"I think there is quite a bit of her in me, or me in her."

Esme is a well-known actress who finds that the roles are not coming as thick and fast as they used to, at the same time she has a visit from her daughter Amy (Rebecca Lacey of the television series Casualty) who has a new boyfriend.

Amy's View, which was first staged at the Royal National Theatre, is written by leading playwright David Hare. It mixes love, death and theatre in a heady and original way.

"It is about Esme's relationship with her daughter and her art," says Susannah. "Her acting career is on the cusp."

And that, Susannah says, rings true to a certain extent with her own life.

"When you grow older you worry and think how are you going to fit in to the next lot of work and are the parts coming or aren't they. They don't always. I have had lean times, I relate very much to it.

"I have had dips. You can be in fashion, then out of fashion."

She also feel a great rapport with her on-stage character.

"She has inconsequential ways and she has an eccentricity about her which I find attractive. She has a kind of theatricality, but basically she is very naturally eccentric as well which is something I see in myself, definitely in my family. I know it. I recognise it."

Susannah York has had a glittering career. She was an Oscar nominee for They Shoot Horses, Don't They? and won a Palme D'Or at the Cannes Film Festival for Robert Altman's Images.

Some of her other notable films include Man For All Seasons, The Killing of Sister George and Superman I & II. She has also had an enriched theatre career playing leading roles in Hedda Gabler, A Streetcar named Desire, Hamlet and Picasso's Women.

Susannah's acting career began almost as soon as she left drama school.

"An old Hollywood agent, who had Trevor Howard and James Mason on his books, came to London. I was his other baby. He discovered me. I was very young. I was very lucky. It was down to him pushing me. I just had to turn up to interviews."

She puts her success down to her being 'quite photogenic'.

"And I had vitality of life. Vitality and life."

It was on the cards from a very young age that Susannah would end up on the stage.

"At nine I remember acting was my first love. It was magic and getting my first laugh was wonderful. I was playing Cinderella in the school play and I was very upset I wasn't Cinderella. But I got the laugh on on my first night and I remember thinking this is it. This is wonderful and I was glad I didn't play Cinderella."

For the early part of her career Susannah lived and breathed acting. Then when she had children she became more politically aware.

"It was in the mid-70s when I became active with CND. It was having children and thinking that we have a great world and we should try and leave it to our children in at least as good a state as we had it.

"I was brought up on the west coast of Scotland and in my childhood I had the whole countryside where I could roam the hills, ride my bike and I certainly wasn't thinking of nuclear bombs and the air being polluted or fields being exchanged for roads and motorways. "Progress, so called, goes on and the green places shrink and bombs multiply."

These days she isn't so much marching and clutching a CND banner in her hands, she is now trying to get Mordechai Vanunu out of prison in Israel.

Mordechai Vanunu is serving an 18 years sentence for espionage and treason, after he was lured by a female Israeli agent from Britain to Rome, and then kidnapped and taken to Israel to stand trial.

He was jailed for telling The Sunday Times newspaper that Israel was secretly building nuclear bombs.

"I have been to Israel with the campaign and delegations. We have got him out of solitary, but he is still in prison until 2004."

Amy's View is at the Theatre Royal, Windsor from March 6 to 17, for tickets telephone the box office (01753) 863444