Amanda's miscarriage agony

Actress Amanda Burton has spoken publicly about the miscarriage she suffered on the night she won TV's Best Actress award.

Instead of joining other stars for the glitzy National Television Awards Ceremony last October, she was in agony and despair at home.

She told the Sunday Telegraph Magazine: "I remember hearing my name announced as a winner and someone saying that I had 'flu. I felt completely out of the situation."

Burton, who is appearing in a new three-part drama series starting tonight on ITV1 called Helen West, said last year was "absolutely terrible".

First her mother died. She said: "I cancelled all my work. I just wanted to sit and think for months on end."

Then when the Ulster-born actress discovered she was pregnant, she hoped things had turned for the better.

"I was so thrilled. I thought something good would come out of that time of grieving," she said.

"But then we lost the baby which is the most ghastly thing a woman can go through."

She cancelled all work again, went to the country and recovered through time, she said.

Burton has now decided she doesn't want any more children.

Amanda Burton, 45, got her first big break playing yuppie accountant Heather Haversham in Channel 4's Brookside.

Since then she has also appeared in Minder, Boon, Lovejoy and Van Der Valk. But she became a big television name when she was cast as Dr Beth Glover in ITV's Peak Practice. She is currently filming another series of Silent Witness for the BBC, playing pathologist Sam Ryan.

She is married to Swedish photographer Sven Arnstein with whom she has two daughters Phoebe, 13, and Brid, 11. The family divide their time between homes in west London and Sussex.

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