The 60-year-old actress Amanda Redman has been back to to promote the Brighton Open Air Theatre (BOAT) in Dyke Road Park, of which she has recently become a patron. “Brighton’s home. I feel it the minute I get here, every single time,” she tells me happily.

“And when the sun comes out, there’s nowhere quite like Brighton.” Though Amanda now lives in London, she maintains strong links to her seaside birthplace.

“My mother lived in Dyke Road [where BOAT is located] and lots of my very oldest friends are still here so I come down to see them frequently.”

Born at Brighton General Hospital, Amanda had an accident with a pot of boiling hot turkey soup when Amanda was just 15 months old left her with third degree burns and fighting for her life.

Doctors actually pronounced her clinically dead at Queen Victoria Hospital in East Grinstead, before managing to revive her.

Amanda remained in hospital for much of the next four years, receiving multiple skin grafts and other arduous procedures.

On her left arm, Amanda displays the scar from this accident proudly, and she has used her own experience to campaign on behalf of the Children’s Burns Trust.

Though she needed multiple further treatments, Amanda said that her five year old self came out from hospital with boat loads of energy and a desire to make up for lost time. In an attempt to expend some of this energy, she was enrolled in a ballet class in Montpelier Road, Brighton.

“I was useless,” she confesses, “Absolutely hopeless, so they very kindly suggested that maybe I’d prefer the drama class upstairs.”

This inadvertent beginning didn’t give much of a hint to the future success that would come, but it did ignite a budding enthusiasm for the theatre, which was nurtured by Carole Best, who then taught at the old Brighton School of Music and Drama, and to this day still teaches here in Brighton. “She was absolutely pivotal!” Amanda exclaims, “She gave me the acting bug.”

Amanda herself went to Hove County Grammar School for Girls - now Hove Park School – in her youth, a time which she remembers fondly. “It was amazing to grow up here. It’s actually a very young city, there’s lot of colleges and universities and loads of foreign students, so growing up here was just fantastic. We would go to the pubs when we were too young and I was heavily involved in amateur theatre from the age of 14.”

With her time at grammar school completed aged 18, Amanda left Brighton for Bristol, where she enrolled in the Old Vic Theatre School, which boasts a host of illustrious alumni of actors such as Daniel Day-Lewis, Olivia Colman, and Gene Wilder.

Once she had graduated from the Laurence Olivier founded theatre school, she moved to London and began her television career with roles as Marina in the BBC Shakespeare production of Pericles, Prince of Tyre, and as Gwendolen in The Importance of Being Earnest, before earning star roles in television series such as police drama, Dangerfield and family comedy At Home with the Braithwaites.

In 2003 Amanda first performed in her most famous role as Detective Superintendent Sandra Pullman in the BBC’s New Tricks, about a group of retired police officers recruited to reinvestigate unsolved crimes. Amanda would remain in the show for ten series, before leaving to pursue new opportunities - such as her current starring turn in The Good Karma Hospital, for which she will shortly be returning to Sri Lanka to film another series.

Amanda, who has a daughter from her marriage to actor Robert Glenister, is married to designer Damian Schnabel.

She has no intention of retiring from acting anytime soon, and is now also working on the other side of the camera, directing Tonight at 8:30, a cycle of one-act plays written by Noël Coward, and with her students at the Artists Theatre School in Ealing, who she intends to bring to BOAT to put on a show that she has directed.

Alongside her services to drama and to a variety of charities, Amanda’s tireless work as Principal of the Artists Theatre School was cited when she received her MBE in June 2012.

Although Amanda continues to reside in London, it is clear that she maintains strong personal and emotional ties with Brighton: “If you grew up here, with the diversity and the blend of cultures, you will have been shaped by the place. It’s unlike anywhere else, certainly in the UK. A wild streak in me comes from Brighton.”