SEX SYMBOL? DON'T MAKE TOM LAUGHTom Conti has sent many a female heart a'fluttering over the years,

"And then they start shaking. They become blind and deaf while I sign something for them and when they walk away they collide with someone.

"I've taken to holding their arm for a few seconds as they turn to go just so that no one gets hurt."

For more than 20 years Conti has been helping his fans up off the floor. It began in the Seventies when he was the floppy-haired Cambridge graduate in Frederic Raphael's TV drama series Glittering Prizes and instantly became the thinking woman's crumpet.

Then ten years ago he played Costas, the Greek waiter in the film Shirley Valentine with Pauline Collins and was probably responsible for thousands of middle-aged women heading for the Adriatic in search of a lover just like him. Now 57, his appeal hasn't diminis-hed. His hair may be more grey than black and his slim physique a little stooped.

But his large brown eyes still have a teasing twinkle and there is no denying the hypnotic quality of his soft, rich voice.

"Sex symbol?

I'm not

a sex symbol," he says, slump-ed on the deep-cushioned sofa of his Hampstead home.

"It's a meaningless phrase, anyway. It's something else. I'm flattered if something I do works. I just regard it as employment." His current bout of employment involves him playing an inept lothario, as it happens.

He is on tour in Neil Simon's Last Of The Red Hot Lovers, which comes to Brighton and Chichester this month. Alongside him on stage are his wife Kara Wilson and their daughter Nina.

Before anyone gets the wrong idea, there are no wooing scenes between Nina, who plays a mad cabaret singer, and her dad.

Kara, meanwhile, plays a heavy-drinking, heavy-smoking, heavy-duty woman "which is as far removed from Kara as you can get," says Conti.

Kara, a well-preserved blonde with a golden tan, joins us for the interview while, Nina, who's tall, slim, pretty and has her father's dark colouring, greets me but then retires to somewhere else in this vast house (complete with a ballroom and minstrels' gallery).

Conti is the star, but Kara is enjoying the attention too.

She "retired" when they had Nina 27 years ago and is visibly excited about appearing before large audiences again. While her husband has won international fame and garnered accolades and awards, she has been the good mother and supportive wife.

"I've done my own one-man shows too to satisfy that urge in me to perform," she says. "But that involved me organising everything, including drumming up audiences."

Kara met Conti, whose father was an Italian hairdresser, when they were both actors in their native Glasgow. It was love at first sight for both of them.

"I was out with a man who took me to see Tom in a play," remembers Kara.

"He knew Tom and we all went for a coffee after the performance. Tom and I spoke to each other and we ignored the other fellow, who I have never spoken to since.

"We found out we were both going to be in the same radio play in three weeks. It was a relief, because we knew then we would be seeing each other again. I knew who he was because he was quite a well known actor in Scotland by then."

"And I knew who she was because she was a well-known beauty and brain," chips in Conti.

"I told my mother that I wouldn't be home for dinner that evening because he was bound to ask me out," continues Kara.

"He didn't because he was going home to watch himself on TV with his mother - he was playing folk guitar on a programme. But he asked me out the next night and every night after that."

They were married 32 years ago and both enjoyed relative success in theatre and on TV until Nina came along. "I had planned to go back to work straight away," says Kara.

"But when she was born I couldn't handle the idea of having a nanny. I didn't want to hand Nina over to someone else."

So it was decided that Conti should become the big provider.

"His career really began to take off," says Kara. He was in London doing a play with Paul Scofield, playing a guerilla in a leather jacket. That was a very sexy part. It was his hair, all that black hair. And the leather jacket."

Conti then destroys this image by telling me the jacket was suede, not leather, and that it had a button hanging off it for the whole of the play's six-month stage run.

"Most of the faces were on Paul Schofield," he adds, modestly. "A few may have lighted on me because most of my scenes were duologues with him."

You get the impression that, even though Conti is the bread-winning actor, Kara is really the one bitten by the performing bug.

Indeed, Conti's first passion was and still is music. "I'd done drama at school and with a semi-professional group. But it wasn't what I'd considered for my life. I always wanted to be a musician and it's something I still want."

So what happened?

"One day I was in Glasgow," he begins. "And I wanted to buy a shirt which involved walking past the music college.

"It was a gorgeous sunny day and all the windows were open. And I heard this wonderful cacophony.

"I walked in to ask what I had to do to get in. There was a sign saying College of Drama and I wondered what that was about.

"So I walked down the corridor and went into an office and spoke to a lady and they had two places left over. And I started a week later."

"Without an audition?" asks Kara, who seems not to have heard the full story before.

"No, I did an audition a week later. A speech from Uncle Vanya. The boss nodded at the others and they said 'You're in'."

"Not like that now, is it?" says Kara, wide-eyed with astonishment. "You're up against hundreds."

Neither of them would have wanted Nina, their only child, to choose acting as a career. But they both agree she has an extraordinary gift for it.

"She has a wonderful comic sense, imagination and impeccable timing," says Conti, trying not to sound too much like the gushing father. "If she didn't have that talent, I would have moved Heaven and Earth to stop her from going into this business."

Nina has come first in many of his decisions, including choosing to stay in England when the work was multiplying in America.

"At the time I was making movies my agent said I should live in Hollywood. Nina was about five or six and I thought I cannot do that to this kid. I love her too much to bring her up in Beverly Hills.

"To be the daughter of a Hollywood actor is a dangerous thing. I did stop doing the movies, but it was the right decision."

In recent years, apart from a slot in the American sitcom Friends as Ross's father-in-law ("school-children know who I am now," he points out), he has mostly worked on the stage.

Last year he had a West End run in the one-man show Jesus, My Boy (which also visited Chichester) in which he played Joseph. Even though the play had good reviews, the title was seen as a turn off. "Jesus doesn't sell theatre tickets," says Conti. "Which is why we've renamed it Whose Kid Is It Anyway? for a run in Sydney, Australia."

Despite his career success, including an Oscar nomination for Reuben, Reuben in 1982 and the New York Critics Award for his role in Merry Christmas Mr Lawrence with David Bowie, he doesn't seem to take his job that seriously. Ask him about his views on education, however, and you get a superb performance.

"I have an irritation with the world and it's all down to the fact that people aren't educated," he says, by now sitting on the edge of the sofa and becoming quite animated.

"All you need to do is have eight children in a class. This sounds a huge expense, but if you consider what happens if you don't do it, which is how much the health service costs, how much the police service costs, how much insurance you pay for your house, the whole country is geared towards the criminal.

"Everything you buy is tamper proof you have to pay for that. You have to cut into the downward spiral by making school a place of sanctuary in low-hope, high-density areas. The only way you can deal with these problems is having small units and then children learn a different way of life. The parents can learn a bit, too, by coming into classrooms."

It is of no surprise to hear that he has just become the patron of a new charity to nurture underprivileged children.

Kara shares his views and has done her bit by helping to set up nurture groups at Nina's old school in Hampstead, of which she is also the chair of governors.

"I admit these are children from rich families and haven't suffered in the same way," she adds before I can say anything about leafy Hampstead.

Now that Conti is all fired up, he's keen to have a go at other things that infuriate him. They include the price of everything.

"Nobody has any money and everything costs a fortune. Hotel prices here are disgusting. I can have a suite in New York for less than it costs to stay in some grubby hotel here. And food. I bought a croissant in Bromley the other week for 95p. Ninety five pence for a bloody roll. They only cost 75 pence in St John's Wood for God's sake."

And when I ask about his love affairs pre-Kara, he quickly turns his recollections about the "fanciable creatures" he used to see at the girls'' Catholic school near his all-boys institution into an attack on Catholic practices. "We were out of bounds to each other, which was all Catholic nonsense. Occasions for sin. That's what they used to call it if you were within 100 yards of someone of the opposite sex."

He frequently crossed this boundary, and then would have to own up to it at confession.

"Certainly, children going to confessions should never have been allowed," he says.

"We were told we had to confess sins of impurity, which was usually masturbation. It was absolutely disgraceful. You would be having sexual conversations with an adult who would be asking you how many times you did it, were other children present, were girls present. That was the beginning of child abuse. I hope it's been stopped now."

It's just as well he directs his anger away from his family, particularly as they are working so closely together at the moment.

"Were not a warring family," he points out during a calmer moment.

"I might raise my voice if I can't find the egg whisk."

"Oh, like you're always whisking eggs," says Kara, with a laugh of surprise.

"Or if I'm looking for the pepper grinder," he says, ignoring his wife.

"More likely the bottle opener," she adds, mischievously.

Whatever fantasies other women may have about Conti, Kara is under no illusion "He's not a sex symbol in our house," she says.

n Last of the Red Hot Lovers is at the Theatre Royal, Brighton, next week (November 9-13, box office 01273 328488) and Chichester Festival Theatre from November 15-20 (01243 781312).

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