BLIND AMBITION
CELEBRITY BODIES : ROBSON GREEN
The 40-year-old miner's son spent four years working as a draughtsman at the Swan Hunter shipyard before taking up acting as a profession.
Now, thanks to such TV hits as Casualty, Soldier Soldier, Reckless, Touching Evil, Wire In The Blood and Beaten plus earlier pop smashes with showbusiness pal Jerome Flynn, he has become one of Britain's highest-paid TV stars and a most unlikely sex symbol.
FRAMEWORK
He is 5ft 9ins (151 pounds) and the first thing you notice are his spectacularly blue eyes. They are one of his best physical features. "My worst feature is my right toe - it's bigger than the left one !" he says.
Going nude in front of the cameras doesn't worry him, and many still recall the love scenes between him and Francesca Annis in Reckless. "We were supposed to be having an affair, and people tend not to have sex with their clothes on."
EXERCISE
He gets plenty of exercise at weekends walking his dog, and "jumping up and down watching Newcastle United !" He adds that he would go swimming every day if he could.
Although he is in pretty good shape, he prefers not to do his own stunts. "If there's someone else there to do it, I think, Okay, I'll have a cup of tea, then."
For his role in TV's Blind Ambition, playing an Olympic 800-metre runner who loses his sight in a car crash, he trained for five months on the track and in the gym and lost half a stone. "I liked being leaner and more sinewy and have kept it that way with fairly regular trips to the gym."
DIET
"I love food, but my favourite is Chinese. I only really began to appreciate it when I went to Hong Kong for Soldier, Soldier."
Since training hard for the Blind Ambition role, he has cut a lot of fat out of his diet. "When you start watching your diet it tends to become a habit - a good one."
LOVE-LIFE
At 24, he met his first wife Alison Ogilvie, an occupational therapist, and they married in June 1991. They separated in 1999.
A year later, he met Vanya Seager, who worked at BMG Records during the Robson & Jerome recordings. They married in March 2001 and have a five-year-old son Taylor Robson Green.
Both Robson Green and Mark Womack underwent extensive coaching by athletes from British Blind Sport (BBS), the registered charity and co-ordinating body of sport for the blind and partially sighted in the UK. The objective of BBS is to encourage blind and partially sighted people of all ages to participate in sports at all levels, ranging from 'grassroots' to Paralympic representation.
Blind athlete Bob Matthews MBE says; "One of the hardest things to do when you're running blind is to synchronize your running with your guide. Robson and Mark seemed very comfortable with each other - very relaxed - and the more relaxed you are the faster you run."
Robson Green has nothing but praise for the blind athletes involved in the production.
Says Robson : " I have been coached by some wonderful athletes and I think their fitness and dedication is inspirational. With their help, we've managed to make the running look extremely realistic and I'm very pleased with the results."
Further research was undertaken at the RNIB Manor House, Britain's leading provider of residential and non-residential assessment and rehabilitation for blind and partially sighted people and some filming took place at The Shire View Centre for Blind and Partially Sighted People in Leeds.
The experienced, professional staff at the centre helped Yorkshire/ Tyne Tees TV's researchers and actors to understand both the realities faced by blind and partially sighted people and the technology and processes used by the workers who help rehabilitate them.
Explains Kaye Wragg, who plays mobility officer Rona : " I spent a day at Shire View and talked to the staff and met some of the blind and partially sighted people. They gave me general information and tips on how they work and I was amazed at their modern approach - they really encourage independence and that's such a good thing. "
The past year has been an emotional roller-coaster ride for Robson Green. His eight-year marriage collapsed, he found a new girlfriend - and now he's about to become a dad. But it's not just Robson's personal life that's changed. The Geordie heart-throb has a new, leaner look to go with it.
One glance at him in his sexy beach wear and you can tell that Robson Green is in superb shape.
He's shed half a stone and is sporting the sort of six-pack a teenage athlete would be proud of. But Robson, 35, dismisses his lean looks as all part of the job.
" I had to look like an Olympic runner in my latest role," he explains. " At the start of filming, I took some shots of myself with a hand-held video camera and I looked like a bloke who had just come out of the pub with his shorts on! Since then my body has really changed. The gut and the love handles have gone and everything has toned up. It's been tough, though, because I had to get the diet right. Skimmed milk, no fat - and it was so hard to give up chocolate. A total nightmare, in fact. But although we've finished the series, I'd like to carry on keeping in shape. I feel so much better for it. "
So the Geordie lad is glad now that he suffered for his part - not that there is anything he wouldn't do to make himself right for a role. He is passionate about his work, as his remarkable career so far shows.
Everything Robson Green has touched since he played Jimmy Powell in Casualty, has been a success. Reckless, Rhinoceros, Touching Evil, Grafters... all were rattling good ratings grabbers. Each part consumes his life until the final take. And for the last year, Robson has been more immersed in his work than ever.
In The Last Musketeer, his character - Steve McTear - is training for the Olympic team but after getting involved in a crime scam that goes wrong, he takes refuge at a private girls school in Scotland - as a teacher. " I had to act with a bunch of girls aged between 11 and 18. It was really tough, " he says with a wicked grin.
But the training was no joke and involved running sessions five times a week. Not so tough, but just as intense, was the training he had to do for the ITV drama, The Last Musketeer for which he had to learn to fence. He found it difficult but grew to love the sport.
Robson says: " I'd never tried it before, but it's fantastic. Modern-day fencers would turn Zorro and the Three Musketeers into tea bags because they're so quick and energetic. But it's a beautiful sport - and very sexy. I had to get to a level where they could film me putting on the mask and then doing a bit of the fencing. They got a professional to do most of it, mind, but I've seen the rushes of the movie and a lot of the stuff that I did they used - which I'm really chuffed about. "
Robson's new super-fit look comes with big changes in his personal life. His marriage of eight years to Alison - regarded as one of the strongest in the business - broke down and after all the stories of love affairs, he has found a new partner in former page three model Vanya Seager, 44, who is expecting his baby.
Robson is an intensely private person and refuses to discuss his personal life. But it is clear he bitterly regrets the pain that his marriage break-up caused his former in-laws. " Things change in everybody's life and I am no different. In the end, you just have to get on with it. But I wish people would leave Alison's folks alone. They don't deserve to be involved. "
And although he is sad that his wife had to endure a very public split, Robson accepts that as far as he is concerned, the recent blaze of publicity about his love life goes with the territory.
Despite his celebrity, Robson claims to live a "normal" life. " I'm not going to lock myself away. I would be really unhappy if I couldn't live a normal life... you know, go shopping or go and see a football match with my dad. I do the same things as most people and, believe it or not, I don't get mobbed when I go out. In fact, people hardly notice me. I don't go in for the big celebrity thing. I don't own a private jet, a big car or give myself star status. I'm not materialistic in any way - I just want to make a good job of the work I enjoy. "
He admits to only one great extravagance - fireworks. " It's a bit of a fetish, really, " he reveals. " I buy a lot of fireworks and if there's any excuse, I'll put on a display. At the end of filming The Last Musketeer we lit up the whole north-west coast with fireworks. "
Robson is currently filming Blind Ambition, and in April starts shooting for an ITV series called Close & True in which he's a successful commercial lawyer. Then, at the end of this year, he embarks on a raunchy six-part series about wife swapping called Take Me.
So he's busy and going to get busier if Hollywood, in the form of Bruce Willis, has its way. Willis rang one day but Robson thought it was a wind-up. " I was convinced it was my mate Joe, who's a brilliant mimic. I was about to say, 'Joe, that was the worst b*** impression of Bruce Willis that I've ever heard' when I realised it was no joke. "
" Bruce's people kept calling me to say, 'Bruce is gonna ring in 15' and then 'He's gonna ring in 5...' Apparently he'd watched all seven episodes of Touching Evil and wanted to know if he could put me forward for some projects. We'll probably meet in the spring. Would I do a film with him ? Does Barbara Cartland wear slap ? " he roars with laughter. The prospect of meeting Bruce in the flesh doesn't trouble Robson one bit. " Now, if he were a Newcastle United footballer, that would be different, " he says.
" I am intimidated by footballers and can't get a sentence out in the presence of one. I went to this New Year's Eve party and Alan Shearer came up to me and said, 'Happy New year, Robson.' I couldn't speak. I just looked at him and said 'Happy New Year... thank you !' Then I walked away and spent the rest of the night worrying about what he must think of me."
Sally Brockway - The People - 12 Mars 2000
ROBSON GREEN IS GOING FOR GOLD