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ringed with eyeliner that Cleopatra would envy, are bright and shrewd. Her hair, the colour of an Irish setter’s, catches the sunlight streaming in through the window. Her small feet are crammed into orange platform shoes, in defiance of her age and gravity. She seems to have forgotten to button the top of her blouse, much to the delight of the café’s male patrons.
    Although she won’t reveal her age — published sources suggest she’s 53 — Price seems not much older than when she left Canals , in which she played the dim-witted but kind-hearted barmaid. (Rumour has it that Ms. Price was sacked by the show’s producers after a series of public contretemps, including a punch-up with a rival soap star in the loo at the Dorchester Hotel.)
    “Stories are just that, darling — stories,” says Price. “They are what we tell ourselves to make sense of our lives.”
    She sets down her latte with a grimace of distaste. (She’s asked for “one of the disgusting ones filled with milk.”) What she is trying to say, I think, is that the truth about her sacking lies somewhere between the producers’ version and her own. In her memoir, she says only that “Kit had become threadbare, and it was time to find a new set of clothes.”
    Considering how entertaining her memoir is — and that its very title contains a warning to the literal-minded — only the most churlish reader would point out the various gaps between Price’s account and the historical record. She claims, for example, to have resigned from her starring role in T he Blood Bank over “script differences” with the show’s producers. At the time, though, it was reported that she’d been asked to leave when she compared her character’s vampirical desire for blood with “a priest’s lust for tiny white bottoms.”w
    When the stories are this much fun, who really cares if she was in drugs and alcohol rehab once or twice (or more often), or whether she was arrested for pushing a shopping trolley off Southend Pier, or if she actually did serve Princess Margaret a drink when she worked at the dog track in Walthamstow?
    “You’re wondering if any of it’s true,” she says with a cat-like smile, the tiny lines at the corners of her eyes creasing. “I suppose I opened myself up to that, given the book’s title. Not that it matters. It’s entertainment, darling.” Her voice is beautiful, low and whisky-tinted, pitched to draw the ear close.
    Augusta Price has been an entertaining fixture on the minor-celebrity landscape since she left the North London School of Speech and Drama a little more than three decades ago. To her Italian-immigrant father, drama school was a betrayal of everything he’d worked and sacrificed for: “Why don’t you just take your money and throw it off Blackfriars Bridge?” he screamed at her when she left the house for good at 17. At that point, she changed her name from Anna Maria Ferragosto to the more marquee-friendly Augusta Price.
    “For him, being an actress was little better than being a whore,” says Price. “And then in my first role at the Edinburgh Fringe I actually played a whore. Topless. He never really forgave me.”
    They were never entirely reconciled. The tangled skeins are hinted at in her book: she seems to blame him, at least in part, for her later problems with alcohol and drugs. Her father had injured his back while working as a stonemason, and lived afterward in a haze of painkillers. At 14, a curious Anna Maria stole one of his painkillers, washed it down with a glass of homemade wine, and never looked back. Or, as she writes, “I looked forward, with pinned pupils, for the next drink, the next high.”
    Yet, for a long while, Price’s dalliance with substances did not affect her career — perhaps because she was hardly alone at the bar. After drama school, and a couple of years in tights playing regional pantos, she made a name for herself in the itv miniseries Highland Mist , in which she