It's now eight years since Patsy Palmer left the show, but people in the street still shout 'Ricky' at her, mimicking the East End accent which came so naturally to the Bethnal Green girl.

Despite winning numerous awards and being generally thought of as one of the most talented actresses on the show, Patsy, now 34, has not retained the same high TV profile in subsequent acting ventures.

She has done a lot of theatre and a smattering of TV including Strictly Come Dancing and, most recently, the heavily criticised BBC courtroom reality show The Verdict, in which she was one of 12 celebrity jurors in a fictional rape case, alongside Jeffrey Archer, Honor Blackman and Ingrid Tarrant.

"The point of the programme was to show why only 5pc of rape cases even get to court. But I found it tough and a couple of days into it I was thinking, 'Why am I doing this?"'

Today when we meet, Patsy looks radiant. Her red hair has been cut into an elfin style, her green eyes shine and her skin is clear.

The mother-of-three has found contentment outside acting, setting up her own company Palmer Cutler with a friend, selling beauty and self-tanning products, and in property investment.

She recently finished renovating a grand old Victorian house which she has made the family home in Brighton and she is happily married to cabbie Richard Merkell, with whom she had her two younger children, Fenton and Emilia. Charley, her eldest, who is now 15, is from a previous relationship.

But a decade ago she was the perennial party girl, popping Ecstasy tablets like sweets, along with booze, marijuana and cocaine, vomiting over dance floors and then turning up on the EastEnders set either still high or horribly hungover.

The show's producer Jane Harris called her into her office a few times to ask her if she was all right.

"Looking back, I'm amazed at my degree of denial and the way I fooled everyone, most of all myself," Patsy says.

"Sometimes I think, 'How am I not dead?', given the drink, drugs, lack of sleep, lack of proper nutrition and non-stop schedule that I inflicted on myself. I often got through the day on a Coke and couple of chocolate bars. I'm not proud of the way I behaved, or what I did to myself."

Patsy doesn't really have time for regrets, although she knows she lost a lot of her youth in a haze of drugs and alcohol. From the age of eight she experimented with drugs and booze, by 13 she was doing speed.

At 19 she had her first child, from a relationship which didn't last. But the party life continued as she became increasingly reliant on her mother to look after the baby.

She has now written her autobiography, All Of Me, which charts her life from her childhood in the East End of London, through her parents' divorce, her escape into acting, descent into addiction and how she has come out the other side intact.

"The book marks an ending to all that mad behaviour," she says now. "It was one part of my life that's now over. The worst part was realising how long the addiction went on for - about 24 years. I do look back and think, what a waste.

"Addiction has been so predominant in my life for such a long time. No matter how much I write about work, about all the lovely things, that was always there."

Bullied at school, acting was a form of escape, she reflects.

Julie Harris (her real name) was brought up with her two elder brothers, Albert and Harry, and originally trained at the Anna Scher Theatre School in London, where many other EastEnders stars such as Sid Owen, Gillian Taylforth and Susan Tully attended.

Aged six, she starred in a West End production of Joseph And The Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat, and later went on to appear in Grange Hill and EastEnders.

"I never thought at six-years-old I'd be an actress. But the theatre was an environment where there were no bullies, I got loads of attention and I found the place that I loved."

In her late teens and early 20s Patsy had a string of disastrous relationships with men who treated her badly and usually dumped her.

"I had such low self-esteem, so if anyone showed me a bit of attention I fell for them. They treated me badly, but I was a young, silly girl."

At 19 she had Charley. "I was much too young," she reflects, but doesn't want to elaborate on Charley's father or the relationship he has with their child.

"Charley knows all about my life. There were times when I behaved irresponsibly as a parent but we have a very close relationship and I hope that my experiences will show my kids that alcohol and drugs are not the way. "

She married film director Nick Love in 1998 after a four-year on/off relationship. The marriage only lasted five months, but she still talks of him fondly.

"I can see I was selfish and that neither of us was ready to put in the time and effort it takes to make a relationship work. Nick and I wanted different things. I wanted the perfect family and home, picket fence and all. Meanwhile, Nick was passionate about his career. And I was still in denial about my drinking and drug-taking."

When her relationship with Nick ended she became close to Richard, but that created a rift with her mother, who thought she was throwing herself into another relationship too soon. They didn't speak for five years.

"We've got a far healthier relationship now," she says. "I relied too much on my mum in the early years. I'm a parent and I started to look at what it was all about. She was just being protective. I just went to see her - and that was it."

Today, she's less of a party girl, happy to do the school run, keep house and run her beauty business. She's been clean of drugs and alcohol since September 2004 and still goes to AA meetings regularly.

Has she been tempted off the wagon in that time?

"I do have certain thoughts and triggers which come into my head, but I have enough tools now and enough experience to get myself better. I still like to go out and enjoy myself, but now I have complete freedom. I could be in this room with everyone around me taking drugs and I'd sit here quite happily until I got bored and went home."

As for TV work, she'd rather act than be herself on screen, she says.

"I don't like reality TV," she says. "I've been asked to appear on all of them - the jungle, Celebrity Big Brother. But I think it's degrading. Why would you want to be filmed having a wash? I don't get it."

Offers are still coming in, but Patsy's more choosy now because she doesn't want to be away from the children for too long.

"I hope acting doesn't become a back seat in my life," she reflects. "But for the first time I know that life is about everything around me rather than everything revolving around me."

› All Of Me, by Patsy Palmer, is published by Hodder & Stoughton, priced £16.99.