Benylin

HE'S one of the sexiest stars on the screen - but Hugo Speer was once so down on his luck he lived on the streets and contemplated suicide.

The Full Monty star, who has romanced some of TV's most desirable women and is now back together with Cutting It star Sarah Parish, says his six months of sleeping rough turned him into a "broken shell".

Hugo, who starred as well-endowed Guy in The Full Monty, says he still wakes up haunted by the memories of living rough in a grubby sleeping bag and drinking whatever he could lay his hands on. I meet Hugo in a Soho cafe and find him sitting in the corner looking dishevelled - a few days' stubble, messy hair, jeans, and that air of brooding sexuality that women fall in love with.

Then the man who was a lover of Tara Palmer-Tompkinson, breaks down as he admits how as a student he would down a bottle of Benylin cough medicine each morning to get him going. With no one to turn to, he says he narrowly avoided becoming a heroin addict and ending up dead.

"It breaks my heart talking about it now, I'm still so upset about it," Hugo admits.

"I wake up at six in the morning and cry because of what happened and what could have been. "But it's a case of moving on and realising I'm in a good position now. I've been at the bottom and am working my way up, and I can't ever go further down than I was.

"I have a deep understanding of what it's like to have a sh***y existence."

Maybe that's what drives him to carry out aid work for starving, orphaned children in ravaged places like Rwanda and Kosovo.

"Maybe I'm crying at lost potential or crying for how things could have been if my life had been happier, safer, more secure. But there are people much worse off than me in this world, I've seen them first- hand and I never lose sight of that."

The nightmare began for Hugo, now 35, as an insolent teenager at Harrogate Grammar School in Yorkshire.

"I was desperate for attention and always showing off." Eventually he was expelled at 15 after being arrested for burgling a shop. He passed seven O-levels at college but "things went downhill from there".

Hugo says: "My studies went out the window. I had too much freedom and basically went bananas, totally mad, I lost my grip on everything.

"I ended up homeless, living on the streets in an old sleeping bag for six months, desperately unhappy. I was absolutely gutted, as near to suicide as is possible, and just teetering on the edge of a nervous breakdown.

I DIDN'T beg, I got by somehow, and people who knew me from college would bring me sandwiches and soup. But I went hungry most of the time and Igot very unhealthy and pretty thin.

"I was literally sleeping on the streets and then I slept in a college bike shed with a concrete floor and corrugated iron roof. I was just 18.

"I didn't bath much, but brushed my teeth at college. I was heartbroken that I'd come so far from the Hugo who was a delightful, loving child who wanted to hug everyone.

"I coped by drinking everything and anything, spirits, bottles of Benylin. It was terrible self- destruction. I'd drink half a bottle of Benylin just to warm me up and take the edge off.

"Either I was going to die or change my ways - there were only two ways Icould go - and if I was going to carry on like that I would have got into heroin and died. My mum found outeventually but my family was very dysfunctional at the time. Mum and dad had their problems, and basically the family fell apart.

They divorced when I was 11 and there was a very bad scene for a while, really horrible, but we've forgiven each other now for all the mess. The nadir of my life was when I got evicted by the police from the bicycle shed.

"When you get evicted from a bicycle shed it's like 'OK, this is really the bottom, and you either totally destroy yourself or pick yourself up and get out of it.'

"I found myself a sh***y job working in a hamburger joint but it paid enough money for me to live in a sh***y flat for pounds 36 a week. It was a toilet but it was a roof and a bed.

"Obviously I failed the A levelsI was doing at college. I was just a shambling wreck.

I got fired from every single job I got and still ended up in trouble with the police, and spent quite a few nights in jail.

"I contemplated suicide a lot, but didn't actually go that one step further. I was a whisker away. "I still feel like giving up sometimes, but there's no way I'm going back down to the streets and the gutter. I was a broken shell with very little self-respect, very little anything, just a tiny pilot light burning.

"I was sacked from the hamburger joint because I set fire to the staff room with an aerosol can and a lighter - another police matter.

"I ran round for a while in a ridiculous fox costume giving out leaflets for a restaurant, The Snooty Fox, but was fired because I got into a fight.

" Hugo, then 21, made a a life- changing decision. "I was in the pub with my friends and suddenly I said, 'I'm going to London to be a movie star'. Once you've done that it's wonderful, you've plucked a little star out and put it in the sky and that's the way you're going to live your life.

Hugo, who says he loved acting in school plays, went to study drama and arts in Chiswick for three years. He landed roles in The Bill and Men Behaving Badly before making his big-screen debut in Bhaji on the Beach in 1993 and starring in The Full Monty in 1997. He looks back on the decision in the pub as the turning point.

"Since then I've lived my life as if there is no alternative. However low I am, I'm always reaching towards that star. It's what keeps me going."

Sarah Parish said she had her heart broken by Hugo after she fell in love with him on the set of TV series Hearts and Bones. She was so distraught she says that she lost two stone pining for him. Now the couple have reunited after a year apart but Hugo, who has never talked about their relationship before, says:

"Everyone thinks I was a bad guy in that situation. I wasn't faultless but I wasn't totally bad. "I'm not a heartless git with women falling at my feet.

I'm not going to talk about why Sarah lost two stone because I know her far better than most people but it's not like she lost the weight because I dumped her. It's not that simple.

"It's true that I have dropped women and broken their hearts, but not thoughtlessly, just by trying to be honest and find my own way. I've also been cheated on and betrayed and had my heart broken.

"I'm closer to a Romeo than a Jack-the-Lad. I like to make a woman feel appreciated. I like love... I'm a lover not a fighter."

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