My first memory is of standing up in a cot and a nurse asking me: “What shall we have for dinner tonight?” And me saying: “Sawdust and hay.” I was 3½ and in Great Ormond Street hospital — my home. I remember pain. It was constant, and I lived with it, as did all the children who’d been burnt. That was the norm. The story of what happened to me on the day of my accident is now so ingrained it’s almost as if I remember it, but of course I don’t at all, whereas it will stay with my mother for ever. Even now, when she hears a child screaming in a particular way, her blood runs cold.

I was 18 months old. We were staying with my grandparents in Brighton. It was Boxing Day morning. My grandmother was out. Mum was Hoovering in the front room and Dad was washing up in the kitchen. Nobody else was up. I’d been given a rocking duck for Christmas. I wanted to be closer to where my dad was standing by the sink, so I dragged it towards him and stood on it. I was singing, and then I lost my balance. There was a huge cauldron of turkey-and-vegetable soup on the stove. When my hand touched the hot metal, it stuck. I fell backwards and pulled the cauldron on top of me. Only my feet were sticking out. I was literally burnt from head to foot.

Mum freaked. It was total panic. I was wearing a woollen cardigan and she pulled it off. But as she did, it took everything off, all the flesh down to the bone. She stopped and then wrapped me up, which was the right thing to do. The first my grandmother knew of it was when she saw the ambulance and heard me screaming for her. I was very close to my grandmother. She dropped her shopping bags in the middle of the road and ran to me.

The accident was much worse for Mum and Dad than for me. They’d been together for about nine years when I was born. Mum was 31, a housewife. She was considered a great beauty — a cross between Elizabeth Taylor and Ava Gardner. She still is. Dad was 27 and a salesman. They’d had a miscarriage before I came along, so I was a very wanted baby. But Mum always said: “You were so perfect when you were born that I just knew it couldn’t last.” So she was very protective of me. She says it was almost as if she expected something like that to happen. And when it did, she felt everything that parents feel when anything happens to their children. But the guilt of pulling off my cardigan has remained with her for ever. Even now when she sees me at some do or other and I’m in a sleeveless evening dress, she doesn’t like it. She gets very upset.

I had third-degree burns to 75% of my body. In hospital I lost consciousness and my heart stopped, but I was revived, and then it was a case of waiting. They couldn’t move me because I was so ill. Later I went to a big burns unit in East Grinstead, where Sir Archibald McIndoe worked — a leading plastic surgeon who had given up his Harley Street practice after the war to save the faces and bodies of thousands of burnt RAF airmen. I was looked after by his protégé — Mr Faulkner. But then he moved to Salisbury. My parents upped sticks and moved too. It hugely affected them, emotionally and financially. I was in hospital from the age of 18 months until I was five, because of all the skin grafts I had. They could only do one or two at a time, because your body can’t take any more than that. Everything healed, which was amazing. Only my left arm remains badly scarred. Mum has never forgiven herself for that.

The stress for my parents was absolutely terrible. And then, a year after I left hospital, Dad contracted leukaemia. He was 33. He beat that, but then he got liver cancer when he was 49. At the same time I was asked to go to Hollywood to be in a film. It was 1980 and I was 21. I’m very glad I didn’t go, because Dad died shortly after that. I wasn’t asked again.

I’ve never felt self-conscious about my scars or covered them up. What helped my confidence when I left hospital was that my parents sent me to a Saturday-morning drama class. I loved it. And that’s why, 10 years ago, I founded the Artists Theatre School in Ealing, west London. It’s not just for actors, and it has nothing to do with getting famous. We have kids there who have been bullied or suffered trauma. It’s an excellent healing process for them, as it was for me. I’m extremely proud of it.

I’ll always remember a wonderful old man — one of McIndoe’s chaps. He’d been shot down in the war and at 19 his whole face had been burnt away. He said: “The most marvellous thing is that I haven’t got old. I’ve got the same face that I had when I was 19.” I look at my arm now and it hasn’t changed a bit. He was right — it is marvellous.

Amanda Redman is filming the fifth series of the BBC1 drama New Tricks, due to be shown next year. She is patron of the Children’s Fire and Burn Trust

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