Lynda reveals search for her real mother

Her first two destructive marriages, particularly the mental and physical abuse she suffered at the hands of her second husband, Italian restaurateur Nunzio Peluso, with whom she has two sons, have been well documented.

But now she has brought more skeletons out of her cupboard in her autobiography, Lost and Found, in which she reveals for the first time that she was adopted and charts her search for her birth mother, Marjorie Moorhouse, a born-again Christian from Canada whose lover, a

ship's crewman, deserted her when he discovered she was pregnant.

More than 40 years later, Lynda was reunited with her real mother. The actress, 61, says it was having her own children (Michael and Robert, now 26 and 22), which caused her to seek out Marjorie through the Missing Children's Network.

"When you become pregnant, you are asked all those questions of inherited diseases and health histories. Added to that my general feeling of inadequacy – I've always struggled with self- worth and wanting people to love me – I just felt I must find out if there were any grounds to my imagined feelings."

Having spent an idyllic childhood in Buckinghamshire with her adoptive parents, pilot Don Bellingham and his wife, Ruth, Lynda felt terribly guilty about contacting Marjorie, even though her parents had told her she was adopted at an early age.

"I felt very disloyal," she admits. "They were absolutely fantastic and it was only over time, through talking to my sisters, that I realised how upset they

were. They did feel threatened and hurt."

She and Nunzio flew to Edmonton, Canada, to meet Marjorie for the first time in 1993, more than 40 years after Lynda's adoption.

Recalling that initial reunion at the airport, she says: "I suppose I'd expected to see me. There was this little old lady who was very short with a shock of white hair. At first I thought I'd made a terrible mistake but it wasn't awkward because she was very extrovert."

Marjorie was by that time married to her late sister's husband, Milton, a stiff, repressed character who didn't approve of actresses. But Lynda worked hard to assume a happy relationship with her mother.

"When we were alone it was very hard because she liked to hold my hand and just gaze at me. She wanted me to call her mum but I just couldn't. It would be a betrayal to mum and dad."

They didn't see much of each other after that initial meeting, although Marjorie met Lynda's adoptive parents and her sons and they always kept in touch.

"It was very much a friendship and I always called her Marjorie. But as I got to know her, I recognised things about her in myself such as her sense of humour and curiosity about life. We also shared a lifelong lack of self-esteem.

"The difference in the lives we'd led was huge, but I did talk to her about what went wrong with my first and second marriage and was surprised how she embraced it even if she didn't agree with it. Her mission as a born- again Christian was to welcome me back into the fold. She saw me as someone needing to be saved."

She may have found her birth mother, but over the next decade the scourge of Alzheimer's struck both her real and adoptive families.

Both Lynda's adoptive parents died in 2005, within a month of each other. Ruth Bellingham had Alzheimer's for 10 years and ended up in a nursing home before she died of a stroke.

"It's a heartbreaking illness," she continues, admitting that she worries that, given her family's history, she might succumb to the disease. However, she really doesn't want to know and hasn't had any tests for a genetic link. "I'm not that kind of person," she says simply. "I just want to get on with life.

"I don't smoke and I don't drink and I exercise and I try to eat healthily and I'm in a profession where I have to use my brain every day. If I now start worrying about how I'm going to die, I'm not going to enjoy how I'm living."

However, the experience with both mothers prompted the actress to become an ambassador for the Alzheimer's Society and

she admits she has changed her priorities.

Now on a national tour of Calendar Girls, in which she plays Chris (Helen Mirren's part in the film), baring all every night to the delight of audiences, she's clearly much more relaxed than she used to be. Her husband, whom she married on her 60th birthday, is accompanying her on tour.

She was performing at the Leeds Grand last week and will appear at the Lyceum, Sheffield, next month.

"From being adopted and having no self-worth, I go on stage every night and feel this wave of love from the audience. I feel I'm part of a huge group of wonderful women."

"I have mellowed," she continues. "I've definitely become more philosophical about things. I'll always pick the parts that stretch me and I'll always be looking for new avenues to try, but why waste energy lamenting about what's happening to you instead of making the best of what's happening to you?"

n Lost and Found: My Story by Lynda Bellingham is published by Ebury, priced 17.99. To order a copy from the Yorkshire Post Bookshop, call free on 0800 0153232 or go online at www.yorkshirepost bookshop.co.uk. Postage and packing is 2.75.

n Calendar Girls will be at the Lyceum Theatre, Sheffield, Monday, April 12 – Saturday, April 24.

Box Office: 0114 249 6000, www.sheffieldtheatres.co.uk