Casualty star Amanda Mealing is no stranger to riveting plot twists on the soap.
But her own life has been every bit as extraordinary as anything the show’s scriptwriters could deliver.
For the 51-year-old actress has told for the first time how she only found out at 30 that she was adopted – when a drunken cousin dropped the bombshell at a wedding.
And today Amanda also reveals that a DNA test has unlocked even more family secrets, including relatives she knew nothing about.
She said: “Once I knew I was adopted, I was terrified I’d open a Pandora’s box by trying to discover my heritage. For 30 years I’d lived a lie.
“I might open a door to tragedy and be rejected a second time.”
Amanda is known to millions as tough-talking surgeon Connie Beauchamp in the BBC’s Casualty and Holby City shows.
She first appeared on TV aged six, and at 12 got her break as Tracy Edwards in school drama Grange Hill.
Among the fans watching that was Claire English – the birth sister just one year younger who Amanda knew nothing about, but whose friends told her how uncannily alike they looked.
It was only after seeing a copy of her own birth certificate that a “premonition” led Amanda to discover her sister – and made her determined to unravel her past.
She said: “I just sat for hours, staring at the information in black and white. Suddenly this all felt so real.”
Struck by the thought she might not have been an only child, she said: “The year 1975 just came to me. I started looking for another child with my mother’s name on the certificate.”
She found one for a girl called Claire, giving the same address.
She was born the year after Amanda, in 1968. But her surname had been changed to that of her stepfather when she was seven – in 1975.
Amanda said: “By now I was married to my husband Richard and we’d just had our first son, Milo.
“That spurred me on even more, wanting to know for their sake as much as mine who we really were.”
Richard found a phone number that matched the Liverpool address on the certificates, and agreed to call.
Amanda said: “An elderly woman picked up and Richard explained he was calling on behalf of someone else.
“Immediately she stopped him and said she knew exactly who he was, she’d been waiting years for this call.
“It was my grandmother – my mum’s mum – and she said she’d do everything she could to help.”
Amanda’s grandmother had adopted Claire as her own daughter, and passed Amanda’s details to her.
Amanda said: “Claire and I spent over an hour on the phone.
“It was strange but also so natural, like we were sisters who’d known each other all our lives, but hadn’t seen each other for a few weeks.”
It is a relationship that has gone from strength to strength, as the pair piece together their family heritage.
Next Amanda was given a phone number for her mother, Joyce, who had gone to live in the US after her girls were adopted. Amanda recalled: “I didn’t know how I’d start that conversation. I couldn’t say, ‘Hello, this is the daughter you left on a doorstep’.”
When she did finally call, Joyce was “lost for words”. She said: “Mum had avidly followed my career from the other side of the Atlantic – she had a big scrapbook full of newspaper cuttings on all the programmes I’d been in.
“Legally she hadn’t been allowed to make contact – she said this was the call she’d waited for all her life.
“Mum had been a model for Biba and been asked to go to America to help set up a new office in Miami.”
They agreed to meet in a London hotel the following month.
Amanda said: “Richard drove me. We had to circle the hotel four times I felt so sick with nerves.
“Mum was incredibly dignified and offered no sense of pity, which I admired. She said as a young girl she was ambitious, but selfish. She made a great aunt, but a terrible mother. She didn’t make any pitiful excuses.”
The one thing Amanda’s mother did not open up about was her father.
She said: “It became clear they hadn’t had any kind of relationship. What had brought them together – this girl from Ireland and this second-generation African – was the death of mum’s sister, who was best friends with my dad.
“Claire and I had effectively been conceived in grief. Mum knew very little of him.
“The one thing she said was he was from Sierra Leone.” When Amanda visited the country in 2007 for Save The Children it felt like she was exploring her roots.
But research by Claire showed it was the wrong part of Africa.
Amanda explained: “Claire used an online ancestry website and discovered our grandfather was actually from Ghana, not Sierra Leone. It spoke volumes about how little Mum knew about Dad.” Amanda then did a DNA test confirming the Ghanaian link.
And she revealed: “Claire also discovered we have three half-siblings – children my father had conceived with a woman after mum.
“It’s staggering, the more we look at our family history, the more we find.”
Claire contacted their half-sister, a social worker who lives in Blackpool, and Amanda has also talked with her.
She said: “She’s lovely and says she wants to meet up. Dad had been a poet and activist, born in Britain. He died many years ago.
“Knowing we’ve still got two other brothers out there to find is so exciting. It’s a story that never ends.”
Not long after discovering her father’s real roots, Amanda was offered the chance to visit Ghana with the charity WaterAid.
She said: “Water is such a fundamental, non-political necessity.
“I love what the charity does, how such a small thing as a tap can change whole communities. Being offered a trip to Ghana felt like destiny.” She spoke to midwives there who lost time collecting water when they should have been looking after patients, and to sick children who had to go to the toilet on the ground outside a ward.
Amanda said: “It’s one thing going to one of these poor countries as a celebrity to raise awareness.
“But for me, I kept thinking, ‘These people could be related to me, they could be my family’.
“When I told the Ghanaians I met about my heritage, they wouldn’t believe me because of my pale skin!”
Amanda lives in Lincolnshire with her screenwriter husband Richard Sainsbury, who she married in 1998.
The couple have two sons, 19-year-old Milo and Otis, 16.
She admitted learning the truth about her past had “explained a lot”.
Amanda said: “I was 30 and at a family wedding when a cousin drunkenly blurted out that I was adopted.
“I’d always felt I didn’t fit in, I looked different to the rest of my family. Suddenly it all made sense.” Her adoptive parents admitted they had never found the right moment to tell her. But she said: “I had no serious cause for complaint.
“They’d given me this charmed life full of opportunities. I’ve certainly never felt unloved.”
But she worried about opening “a whole Pandora’s box of pain”.
She said: “I’d been rejected once and might be again. Maybe the truth would be horrific and I was better off not knowing.
“But when Claire and I finally met, I knew there was no way we weren’t sisters. We looked so alike, the same colouring, hair and skin, even the same personality. Claire told me her friends always said how alike she was to ‘that girl on Grange Hill’.”
Amanda says she researched the Ashanti tribe who she and Claire are descended from, and plans to find out more.
She said: “The Ashanti are seen as the most noble tribe in Ghana. Who knows, I might be an Ashanti princess.”