She became a housebold name playing James Herriot's wife in the TV series All Creatures Great and Small, but now it's her best-selling books everyone wants to talk about. Carol Drinkwater tells Nick Morrison about her love for writing - and her encounters with a literary giant.

CAROL Drinkwater was a writer long before she made a living from acting, even before she had her first story published in a girls' magazine at the age of nine. "I always knew I would be an actress, and I dreamed of being a writer. One was my fantasy and one was my certainty," she says.

She only turned her fantasy into reality after an acting career which ranged from playing James Herriot's wife Helen in the TV series All Creatures Great and Small, to roles in the National Theatre alongside Laurence Olivier and in Stanley Kubrick's A Clockwork Orange. But her writing very much grew out of acting.

"When I first met my husband I was telling him what I thought were the weaknesses in a script I'd just been filming, and he said why didn't I write a treatment for a television series?," she says.

The result was The Haunted School, a best-selling children's novel made into a critically acclaimed film and TV series, and an encouraging start as a professional writer. But the move from acting to writing was still more evolutionary than the result of any one decision.

"I started spending more time in France and it seemed like the perfect time to make the transition into something more to do with what I wanted to create for myself. I didn't intend to give up acting, and I still don't intend to give up acting, but I didn't expect this series of books to be an enormous success," she says.

The series is her Olive books, her memoirs set around her and husband Michel's love affair with an olive farm in the south of France. The Olive Farm and The Olive Season were both best-sellers, and the day we meet Carol has been buoyed by the news that the latest instalment, The Olive Harvest, will enter The Sunday Times bestseller chart at number three.

She says she has worked hard to make people take her seriously as a writer, rather than just another actor trying to cash in on their fame, and is thrilled to have been awarded the honour of an invitation to this year's Hay Literary Festival, although she admits to occasionally feeling like a cuckoo in the literary nest.

She doesn't rule out a return to acting, but her training is still coming in useful in her writing career, giving her both a visual appreciation and a sense of drama which she deploys in her books.

"All the years I worked on television and on stuff like James Herriot have been a great teacher to me," she says. "I automatically play every character out. That is probably why I think of myself as an actress who writes, because I come to it as a performing story-teller."

She turned down a role in ER - it clashed with her book tour - but says she would be interested in classical roles, or a one-woman play. Literary tours have given her a taste for one-woman performances, although she admits she finds it nerve-wracking. It took the Olive books to replace All Creatures as the main reason people stop her in the street, although the series, which attracted more than 20 million viewers at its height, has an enduring appeal.

"There are other things that are precious to me in different ways, but All Creatures changed my life and it gave me a worldwide profile. I could never understand it at the time: I was only 27 and I didn't know what lay ahead," she says.

When she started writing, she sought help from another actor resident of the south of France, Dirk Bogarde, whose advice was, "Get on with it then". Perhaps more of an inspiration was Graham Greene, particularly when she found herself sitting next to him on a flight from London to Nice while she was reading Brighton Rock. He signed it, and they struck up a conversation. Even though Greene was then in his 70s, his charisma was still apparent.

"He was gorgeous. I could see why women were so crazy about him, I would have had an affair with him," she says.

"After that, I regularly used to see him in the south of France, and we often used to wait in the same caf for the English papers to arrive, although I never went up to him. I did once see him dancing with a fire hydrant in the street, though. He liked his ros."

* The Olive Harvest by Carol Drinkwater (Orion, £6.99).

Published: 14/06/2005