Sian Phillips is discussing public transport. Specifically the tube, train and bus she'll later use to get to a voice lesson in a distant south-London suburb. It's a far cry from the days when she had a fleet of cars - including a Rolls Royce with peak-capped chauffeur - at her disposal. In material terms at least, life during her 17-year marriage to fellow actor Peter O'Toole was easy: houses in Hampstead and Connemara, a suite at the George V in Paris, live-in staff, and an art collection including Bonnard, Braque and Jack B. Yeats.
The reality was rather different. Life with O'Toole was like "living with the good cop and the bad cop in the same person", she writes in Public Places, the second volume of her autobiography. He destroyed her confidence and held back her stage career, implying that her acting was little more than a part-time activity to keep her busy. Their rows were such that she installed sound-proofed doors to prevent the rest of the family hearing them. Yet they were a couple deeply in love. She may describe him as "a dangerous, disruptive human being", but later writes "his chauvinism was equalled only by his attractiveness".
Contemporary photographs show them to have been a glamorous couple, the epitome of swinging 1960s London. It's nearly quarter of a century since they separated, but Sian Phillips is as elegant as ever, her voice deepened by decades of heavy smoking (even though she gave up 22 years ago), the gentle vowels of her childhood Welsh accent still clear. Her teenage life, acting and broadcasting in Welsh and English alongside names like Dylan Thomas and Richard Burton, was told in the first volume of her autobiography, Private Faces.
Continuing the reference to W.H. Auden in its title, Public Places is far from the normal showbiz anecdote-fest. "It was hell to write," says Phillips. "The focus on my private life wasn't something I wanted to do, and I wasn't all that keen on writing too much on O'Toole, but he is so central to my story that I couldn't not." Originally, she thought the delayed third volume of his biography would be out by now. "I thought if anyone is going to tell my story I'd rather it was me. Not that I thought he was going to be nasty about it, but I didn't think he'd be very accurate."
The book chronicles three divorces: from her first husband in Wales, from O'Toole and from Robin Sachs, the man she left O'Toole for. In the final chapter, an American friend expresses incredulity that she got through all of that without therapy. When I ask her if there was anything healing in writing about it all, she is adamant in her response. "It made me feel worse, actually, quite ill. It wasn't releasing or cathartic in anyway. I'd been through it all and closed my mind to it, and opening it all up again wasn't any fun at all."
Phillips first met O'Toole in 1957, when he was one of a small band of actors determined to smash the cosy conventions of British theatre. They were soon touring the country together in John Hall's play The Holiday, he using any spare time to teach her how to drink beer and whisky. During a drunken Dublin weekend, the couple married - against the advice of most of their friends. Soon after, O'Toole joined the Royal Shakespeare Company, and the newlyweds took a house in Stratford. It was there that reality kicked in.
Her supposedly equal partner expected his wife to cook, clean and iron. When she became pregnant she was told that the baby was not to interfere with her husband's work. Throughout all of this, O'Toole was drinking heavily - on one occasion he was called to meet the great producer Cubby Broccoli, who wanted to replace an actor who had a "drink problem". All went well until a bottle of whisky fell out of O'Toole's overcoat pocket.
As a student at RADA, SiΓn Phillips had won numerous awards and medals, her performances received rave reviews; when she left she received job offers from film studios, major theatre companies and from the rapidly expanding number of television stations in Britain. But as soon as she married O'Toole, her career was marginalised in favour of his. Even a business partner in the company set up to promote both their careers announced: "It's all right for her to work as long as she doesn't get in Pete's way and so long as he isn't embarrassed by her."
A friend once quizzed her on how she managed to combine being a mother with having a career. O'Toole answered for her: "She doesn't have a career, she has jobs."
In fact, SiΓn Phillips has enjoyed a hugely successful working life, appearing in such seminal television series as I Claudius and How Green was my Valley, films like Valmont and Dune, long-running plays including Shaw's Man and Superman and Tennessee Williams's Night of the Iguana, and musicals Pal Joey and A Little Night Music. Despite all the triumphs, however, it is clear that she feels her career did suffer because of her role as "Mrs O'Toole".
"It was very crushing - I might as well have taken the plug out of my career. I was offered lots of work in America, for example, and it didn't occur to me to go because he was travelling so much and I had to be in London near the children. I turned one play down and Faye Dunaway got it - she was completely unknown at the time. They said 'we've got this young actress', and I said, 'OK, go ahead, give it to her'."
The few occasions they acted together were disasters. "It wasn't enjoyable, and I never quite knew why. I think he was nervous on my behalf. I don't think he trusted me. I don't think he thought I'd be any good." One of the strongest elements of their relationship was the notes they would give about each other's performances. "We had had in common a fascination for the nuts and bolts of acting. He was very clever, a much better technician than I was, so good at fixing problems. He was the best teacher I ever had."
Another of O'Toole's winning qualities was the aura of danger that surrounded him. No one ever knew exactly what would come next, and in a crisis he could be relied on to save the day. In Venice he managed to persuade a boat owner to transport them into the city when it was officially closed due to heavy floods. In Venezuela he convinced a helicopter pilot to land his aircraft next to the top of an enormous waterfall where no one had ever landed before. Later he chartered a tiny open boat to go up the Orinoco, managing to get 400 miles further upstream than a BBC film crew complete with hovercraft and armed guards. "On our first trip through Europe he wasn't famous, nobody knew who he was, but everyone wanted a bit of him," she says. "He was like a Pied Piper. You were living in the middle of a very exciting adventure. Not very real, but very, very interesting."
I find myself trying to reconcile these two sides of O'Toole, and ask Phillips: "So, on the one hand he could be the most amazing person, but on the other . . . ?" I don't know how to finish. She does. "A nightmare. He did and does fascinate me, but I can't claim to understand him."
In 1975 she met Robin Sachs, also an actor, and thus began the process leading to her divorce from O'Toole. When they first split up, he was adamant that the press should not find out. Phillips was shooting a film at the time and O'Toole insisted that the studio car still collected her each day from outside their house in Hampstead, rather than the flat she had taken in Chelsea. "I had to tell the driver 'don't ring the bell, I'll meet you on the corner'.
"What I thought would happen to me if this got out to the papers I don't know, but I was terrified, absolutely terrified." Was she never tempted simply to ignore him? "No, it never occurred to me. The habit of doing whatever you are told dies hard. I was very obedient. Feminists are going to hate me, and then there'll be others who will hate me because I was too independent, too stroppy, and left in the end anyway. I feel I don't fare very well from anyone's point of view."
When she separated from Sachs in the early 1990s, friends immediately suggested possible new partners, but by then Phillips had realised her character better suited being single. "My mother always had that opinion - and I used to get very irritated with her about it. I was always determined to prove she was quite wrong by getting married . . ." she pauses and laughs deeply, ". . . a lot. I really love being captain of my own ship. You have obligations to children and to friends, friends especially, but basically, I know if I want to go to America tomorrow I can. I don't have to negotiate. A friend of mine wrote a short story about how haunting it is to come home to an empty house, and I remember telling him at the time - that's my idea of total bliss."
Although they were together for more than 15 years, Sachs features in less than 100 pages of the book. O'Toole is present throughout. She says she has few regrets about their marriage. "I'm sorry I wasted a lot of time and didn't manage myself better, but balancing everything up, I would do it all again. It was an amazing experience, it just wasn't very practical from my point of view."
Does she think O'Toole will read the book? "I don't know. I've a feeling maybe not. I haven't seen him for 25 years, so I don't even know what sort of person he is - obviously he's not the same person. It wouldn't surprise me if he was very patronising about it - 'Oh, let her have her big moment'." Again she roars with laughter. "I wouldn't think he'd take it very seriously."
Private Places by SiΓn Phillips is published by Hodder and Stoughton (£20 in UK)