Lynda Bellingham: My family values

My childhood felt incredibly secure . My dad was a pilot, my mum was a housewife and I had two sisters, Barbara and Jean. Life was very ordered. Manners were very important. I remember my mother saying: "You don't have to be rich to be a lady." That gentility has gone out of society, but I've tried to carry it on. I knew quite young that I was adopted . Mum and Dad always said: "You're very special because we chose you." I loved that. When we were little, I was close enough in hair and eye colour to look like everybody. But, as a teenager, I looked very different and was a different personality to the rest of my family. You could be kind and say I was rather theatrical or you could say I was a pain in the arse. My parents were adamant about truth-telling but I played truant and went to the pictures sometimes. One incident has stayed with me, where I lied and said I hadn't. It went on for hours, and the anger in them grew until they said: "We don't know where you've come from!" It became my cri de coeur that my birth mother must have been a drunken old slapper. Mum and Dad were appalled by the idea of me being an actor. I did a play in the West End about Toulouse-Lautrec, and I had to walk on stage starkers. When it got to it, Mum nudged poor Dad and he looked away. I never wanted children . I had Michael when I was 35 and Robbie when I was 40. Then, the minute I held Michael, my first thought was: "What kind of woman would give up a baby?" That's when I started talking to my parents about my adoption. They told a very moving story. Dad said: "When we went to pick you up, as I was driving away I caught sight of this woman running after the car, howling. I didn't know whether to put my foot on the accelerator or the brake, but I chose the accelerator." But when I finally found my birth mother, Marjorie, in Canada, I didn't realise how badly my parents felt betrayed by me. The weirdest thing was that when I told Marjorie that my marriage was all wrong, she said: "Oh, Lynda, dear, I'd no idea you could inherit a lack of self-worth." That is obviously a very strong gene. I see Marjorie as a friend really. I had one very poignant moment with her when she tucked me up in bed and said: "Please call me mother." I had to say: "Look, I can't because it's betraying my parents. I love you in a way, but I don't know you." It's Mum and Dad I talk to in the middle of the night. I hankered after the kind of marriage my parents had . I wanted structure. I wanted the man to go to work, and I wanted to run the home – as well as having a career. But my first marriage was unconsummated – a therapist told me a lot of men could have casual sex but had difficulty seeing the women they loved as a sexual object, and my second husband was abusive and insecure. We were married for 16 years. The morning I left him, I'd called the police. I'd kept the abuse quiet because I was terrified I'd lose my Oxo advertising contract. The minute somebody came in from outside and said: "This is wrong," the thread was broken – he'd lost his power over me. It took me 60 years to find my third husband . There's a lot to be said for sticking to people who have similar backgrounds and values. Lynda Bellingham is touring in the stage play Calendar Girls, seecalendargirls.com