In 1983, I bought my first place, a flat in the Grampians, on Shepherd’s Bush Road, west London. The block is architecturally famous: it is typically art deco, and Dennis Potter’s Pennies from Heaven was filmed there. I’d just finished a West End show called Windy City, and I’d been saving to put down a deposit. At £22,500, the flat was within my price range.

It was compact – you couldn’t swing a cat in it – with a tiny bedroom, bathroom and sitting room, and a minuscule kitchen. There was a balcony off the bedroom and sitting room. I thought the flat was cute – and, because it was on the first floor, I thought it would be safe.

When I moved in, I had loads of happy times. I was 22, and working at the Bush theatre over the road, so we all used to pile back. The place was always crowded with friends.

I painted it cream and had bookshelves made. I put up mirrors everywhere to make the flat look larger. I wanted wall lights, and I remember finding electricians in Yellow Pages. They put the lights up, but didn’t sink the wires into the wall. They said: “This is the latest fashion.” And I said: “Oh, is it?” The furniture was all Habitat. There was a cream sofa, to match the cream carpet, a coffee table and a white laminate dining table that folded against the wall. If I had people over, I had to move the coffee table to put up the dining table.

The kitchen was pine and shabby, but I couldn’t afford to change it. Gary Oldman, who was then with Lesley Manville, gave me their old bright-green psychedelic fridge because I didn’t have one. I was fond of emerald-green towels in the bathroom, which I got from Fenwick. I thought them the height of glamour!

I lived at the Grampians on my own, then with Robert Glenister after we married in May 1984. As soon as he moved in, bizarre things started to happen.

The first incident was when he was away in rep in Leicester, doing The Cherry Orchard. I’d gone out for the evening with two friends, and they took me back to the flat. It was June, and very warm. I put my key in the lock and, when I opened the door, this blast of ice-cold air literally pushed all three of us against the wall in the communal hall. The first thing that came into our heads was that there was somebody in the flat, and that the balcony doors must have been opened. But there was nobody there, and the doors were locked.

Then the radio alarm clock came on. It had been set to six minutes to midnight, which, of course, is a time you’d never set an alarm for. It was so scary that my friends said: “You ought to come and stay the night with us.” Next day, I came back with my parents, who were taking me up to Leicester to see Robert. We made coffee in our new coffee-maker, a wedding present. We didn’t drink all of it, and my mum turned off the machine. Next day, Robert and I came back. It was on, but the coffee hadn’t burnt away, so it must have just been switched on.

A couple of months later, we got two kittens, Menace and Minnie. All four of us were in the bedroom when Robert and I got this horrible feeling, and the cats’ fur stood up on end. The following morning, I was waking up, and had my eyes closed. I could hear footsteps in our hall, and called out to Robert to make some tea. Then I realised I could feel his leg next to me in bed. I sat bolt upright, and all the lights in the flat started flashing on and off. Robert rushed up and found our front door open. He came back into the bedroom and said: “Oh my God, look at your knee!” On my knee was drawn a face, with a crooked mouth, crossed eyes and weird meeting-together eyebrows. The lid of a felt pen Robert had put on the dressing table was on the floor, but the pen was missing.

That morning, I was rehearsing Oxbridge Blues, a Frederic Raphael film, with Ian Charleson. Ian picked me up, and I told him the story as he was driving. He looked at my knee and nearly crashed the car! Our director, James Cellan Jones, who was into poltergeists, said: “It sounds to me like you need to do a bit of history.” In the old days, there were huge serviced flats at the Grampians, and he suggested that our little unit had once been a nursery. He said the spirit sounded childlike and mischievous, and maybe it didn’t like the fact that I’d married.

I was too frightened to stay and, at the beginning of 1985, we moved in with Robert’s parents. We put the flat on the market with the estate agents I’d bought from 18 months earlier. They said this was the third time they’d sold the place, and that nobody stayed longer than 18 months. Eighteen months later, Robert and I went back to see if the chap we’d sold to was still there. He’d just moved . . .

Interview by Rosanna Greenstreet

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