AMERICANS love a good ragsto-riches story and the life of Derry actress Roma Downey epitomises the American dream. Although classically trained as an actress in London, Downey started work as a coat-check girl at a restaurant on Broadway when she first moved to the US in the late 1980s.

Today she lives in an exquisite mansion in Malibu, next door to Barbara Streisand, while Kenny G and Pearse Brosnan are just up the road. Later this month, she will get married for the third time to the man she calls "the love of my life", the television mogul Mark Burnett - the father of reality TV in the US.

It's been a long and winding road from Ship Quay Street in Derry to Hollywood and Malibu and 47-year-old Downey is the first to acknowledge it. Over tea last week at her enormous home, she recalled that shortly after moving to LA in the early '90s, a family friend from Derry, Fr O'Kane, came to visit.

"I wasn't long here and I remember driving the two of us in my beaten-up old Honda out to the colony at Malibu for lunch. We were walking along the beach afterwards and looking up at these massive houses that had all these security signs outside basically telling you to buzz off. We were very obedient and didn't try to go on the grounds, but took photos of each other outside the fences of these palaces where we knew the stars lived, " she laughs.

"Well, it was with great amusement that I rang Fr O'Kane up a few years later after I bought my first house in Malibu and said to him, 'Now I live on the other side of the fence in Malibu!'" Downey has become a household name in the US through her starring role in US TV drama called Touched By An Angel, which ran from 1994 to 2003. "The show allowed me the luxury of never having to work again, should I so choose, " she says.

She and another actress, Della Reese, played the roles of angels who worked for a non-denominational God, who sent them on missions to help sort out problems in people's lives. The show won numerous awards and had a weekly audience of 30 million viewers in the US. Peoplemagazine named her one of the 50 most beautiful people in the world in 1997 and another national magazine named her "one of the most fascinating people in the world".

But there's nothing like family, especially an Irish family, to bring you back down to earth, especially when you are being validated elsewhere.

"When we were filming Touched By An Angel in Salt Lake City, my sisters would sometimes come out to visit. The year after I appeared on those two lists, one of my sisters was here when the 1998 list was published and she pointed out that I was neither beautiful nor fascinating the following year!

It's funny, but it's also a great reminder of how fickle the whole thing is. If you allow yourself to be defined by celebrity, it really begs the question of who you are when you're not in the public eye. We've all read about people falling apart when they lose the limelight, because they basically have no sense of themselves."

Downey says she feels fortunate that she was in her late 20s when she became famous - "I don't think I would have been ready for it any earlier" - and is also grateful for the no-nonsense Derry background she came from.

Her relationship with her father was a huge formative influence on her, growing up as she did during the worst of the Troubles in Derry. "I couldn't wait to leave and he always encouraged me to study, saying education would be my passport in life. He practically kicked me out to college, with great love, and always reinforced the value of learning."

After leaving school, she first went to art college in Belfast, before furthering her studies in Brighton. She was living in Brighton in 1984 when the IRA bombed the Grand Hotel, nearly killing Margaret Thatcher and several senior cabinet members.

"It was a very complicated time to be Northern Irish in England and I experienced an awful lot of racism and animosity, " she said. But she remained in the UK and was accepted into the prestigious London Drama School at Ealing, where she was described as "the most promising student" of her year when she graduated.

She acted briefly with the Abbey players, touring the US with The Playboy of the Western World. The contrast between being Irish in the US at this time and her experience in England could not have been sharper.

"When I first came to America, I thought I'd died and gone to heaven because the very things that people seemed to have been angry at me for in England - my accent, my humour, my love of literature and poetry - these were things Americans really appreciated.

"Suddenly being Irish felt exotic and appreciated. By comparison with my English experience it was like night and day. That combined with the fact that everyone had such good teeth - I was in shock!"

When her beloved dad passed away, it was easier for Roma to consider emigrating to the States and she says she still feels his presence and influence in her life.

Married twice in the '90s, Downey has a nine-year-old daughter, Reilly, from her second marriage. When a schoolmate made a hurtful comment to the little girl about not coming from a 'proper' family, she wrote a children's book for her daughter called Love is a Family.

But all of this has changed, now that she has met and become engaged to Mark Burnett, who is also divorced and has two sons of roughly the same age.

A former British soldier, he served in Northern Ireland, as well as the Falklands, experiences he has used in his highly successful TV career, as the founder and producer of shows like Survivor and Eco-Challenge.

The two met in a hair salon in Malibu four years ago, after eyeing each other in opposite mirrors for a while and each asking the salon owner who the other was. She says she was immensely relieved that he did not recognise her, "because when you're a celebrity, you never know if people want to know you for yourself or your profile".

The salon owner played the role of Cupid and gave Burnett Downey's phone number;

he later called her up.

"When we went out we discovered we had this shared background in so many ways; we came from the same corner of the world, we both came to America looking for the American dream, we both found it and we ended up on the same stretch of beach in Malibu. We both drove Range Rovers, we were both divorced and we had children of the same age. We moved in together very quickly and we both had enough experience to know to appreciate something good when you find it and not to take it for granted."

Burnett's history as a serving British soldier in Northern Ireland during the Troubles did not come up for while and was an understandably thorny issue when it did.

"I certainly didn't know that going into the relationship until he shared it with me and then we really learned from each other, " says Downey. "He had no idea about Irish politics;

he was 17 or 18 when he enlisted, a young boy entering the army for excitement and adventure and looking for a way out of his working-class background. Then he ends up in our country with no idea why he was there.

"But you know, it's not something we talk about much now, although it inevitably comes up with journalists. Initially when we got together there was some very mixed press back home, which was hurtful and confusing - you'd have thought the way some of these stories were written that Mark was patrolling the streets of Derry and I was throwing stones at him. There were a lot of Romeo and Juliet clich�s about us."

The two will marry in a private ceremony this month, and there will be no deals with Hellomagazine or the like. She is highly protective of the privacy of the family she calls her "Brady bunch" and is concerned at media interest in the wedding. "They're already snooping around and I have no desire to let this wedding become a threering circus."

Burnett is currently working on a TV project with Steven Spielberg set in Hollywood called On The Lotwhich is due to air next month. His latest show, Are You Smarter Than A 5th Grader? , is currently a big hit alongside Survivor and The Apprentice. He and Downey are together currently developing a reality TV series called On One Condition, which builds on Downey 's profile as an angel and would see her working with her old colleague Della Reese again.

"It'll be a bit like Jim'll Fix It; we will help people with real-life problems, but on one condition - that they try to pass on the help they've received by helping out other people who have difficulty in their lives, in particular people who have hurt them or who are not their close friends. We hope that the show would be a catalyst for a movement of kindness."

By any objective standards, Downey is in a really good place in her life right now and is keen to inculcate a sense of gratitude in her children.

"To those whom much is given, much is expected. This is the philosophy by which I try to live my life, " she says. "Mark and I can stand on the bluff of our multi-million dollar Malibu home looking out at the Pacific and we know what it took to get here. We know the sacrifices, the hard work and the integrity, the dreams that brought us to this place and we're filled with gratitude.

"But we've three young children who've been born into it and who don't know that.

I'm trying to teach them to be respectful and to be giving and to understand that just because they've 'more than', doesn't make them 'better than'."

Her enormous Irish wolfhound Finn McCool comes wandering in from the garden through the house, which boasts an exquisite art and antiques collection, including several Matisses, a Picasso and a Chagall.

Downey has just finished a very successful run in a play in Los Angeles called A Picasso and feels grateful for the role as well as her success which enabled her to own such a collection.

She is intensely involved in a charity called Operation Smile, which raises money to perform operations on children born with cleft lips. She travels frequently to countries like Vietnam, Cambodia, Honduras and Venezuela, working for free for the organisation. She brings the children with her on some of the trips and they help her buy toys to give to the children before they have the surgery.

She has also designed a range of jewellery and home accessories and says she would now like to turn her hand to novel writing.

In Downey's hands the American dream just keeps on getting sweeter.