FROM Kidderminster convent girl to Hollywood star, life has been a rollercoaster ride for erstwhile actress Sammi Davies.

Best known over here for performances in box office smashes Mona Lisa, Hope and Glory and The Rainbow, Sammi, 36, has given up the big screen to return to Britain and a career behind the camera.

Sammi, who now lives in Cleobury Mortimer, turned her back on life in the fast lane once before, giving up a promising career as a competitive swimmer, at the age of 14 following trials for England.

Her attention switched to acting and after parts in school plays at the former Holy Trinity Convent school, Birmingham Road, she got a job with a Birmingham educational theatre group. At 21, Sammi set off for London, moved into a bedsit above a shop and began plying for work.

She soon landed a part in 80s TV series Auf Wiedersehen Pet and after a recommendation by Jimmy Nail that she get an agent, quickly landed her first big screen role, as a teenage prostitute playing opposite Bob Hoskins in Mona Lisa.

More parts followed, as Ursula, in an adaptation of The Rainbow, and as Dawn in John Boorman's Hope and Glory. "I always played this sexy miss," she says. "It's so not me. It was fun but at the same time I was feeling insecure. I'm more of a tomboy."

In 1989 she decided to move to Hollywood which brought two years in a top weekly TV drama, Home Front - for which she was nominated for a Golden Globe award - and the obligatory Hollywood lifestyle.

"I loved it. It was like being on a fairground ride the whole time," she says. "It's everything you can imagine."

But although she had the house with "palm tree at the front and swimming pool at the back," the endless round of parties and celebrity pals, she was and is unspoilt by it all.

"I did not want to be famous. I grew up in a traditional English family and went to a convent which was very suppressive," she says. "You did not say what you thought."

America, she says, "was like freedom to think. I studied spirituality for three years. I learnt a lot and that was why I was able to return to England. I never thought I would."

It was concern for the effect of her life at the top on daughter Itasca, then three, that prompted the return and ceding of not just her jet-set lifestyle and career in Hollywood studios, but a rapidly growing parallel career as a top studio photographer.

Now Sammi, who also has a seven-week-old daughter, Ocean, plans to pursue a career as a photographer over here, with a studio in Stourport.

It all seems a long way from LA but she says of her return: "It's like real life and I love real life.

"I feel more human and more contented than I have ever been."