Husband to the legendary Juliet Mills and star of 80s super-soap Dynasty, as well as the ill-conceived musical Grease 2, Maxwell Caulfield has returned to his theatre roots in Alan Ayckbourn's Bedroom Farce, running at The Churchill Theatre in Bromley next week.

The former teen heartthrob talks to MATTHEW JENKIN about starring alongside his wife and his rise, fall and rise again.

How did you get involved with Bedroom Farce?

Michael Caulfield: My wife (Juliet Mills) was originally approached about being in it and the producers then hit on the idea of me joining it, partly because of my profile having been raised after doing Emmerdale last year.

For Juliet it was about her association with Alan Ayckbourn, the great playwright who she worked for several years ago and Sir Peter Hall (the director), who she's rekindling an artistic union with after having played Titania for him back in the 60s with the RSC.

So, she couldn't resist the bait and if she was going to take it, I was going to take it.

When I was growing up in Richmond in the mid-70s, a lot of these Ayckbourn plays tended to come through the area en route to the West End.

So, I'd see these plays at their inception and it was very exciting. I learnt a great deal from going to the theatre and seeing his plays first hand.

Hopefully it went in subliminally and I'm doing Ayckbourn the way it's meant to be done. There's a heightened naturalism about the plays because they are about very normal folk.

He's a brilliant observer of human behaviour. He's a very wry observer of the battle of the sexes and the vices we use to control one another.

What is it like working with your wife?

Caulfield: It's lovely. I'm on the road with her and we are blessed with a great simbiotic relationship, which means we are very happy co-habiting 24 hours a day.

We don't actually work a lot together on the stage in this show but we are in the same company and that means a lot to us.

We can handle separation a lot better than we used to when we were younger and one tends to be more insecure, but at the same time we also recognise that a day apart is a day wasted, so this is a splendid opportunity to be in each other's pockets.

You starred alongside Michelle Pfeiffer as Michael Carrington in Grease 2. How did you get the role?

Caulfield: I wanted to follow in John Travolta's footsteps ever since I saw him show up to the premier of Saturday Night Fever in Leicester Square.

I was working as an usher at the Odeon across the square at the time and I saw this crazed atmosphere being generated by him as he pulled up in a white Rolls Royce with The Bee Gees.

I was knocked out by it. So maybe that planted a seed.

But what really got me the job was that I was in a revival of Entertaining Mr Sloane off Broadway.

A lot of top people were coming to see the show and I had a bit of heat, getting on some magazine covers and being photographed by some of the real top photographers in New York at the time.

I kind of pre-dated the Calvin Klein underwear model because my character in the play spent half the time without his trousers on.

I was playing a bisexual boarder in this strange house in a decrepit part of London and playing the field.

It was a very alluring character and I was lucky enough to be playing this guy and at a point where the public were able to accept the show, because when it opened 10 or 15 years earlier it had crashed and burned.

Audiences were outraged by the play. This time around they got it and were into the play's black humour.

I was very fortunate because I caught that wave and was offered a screen test for Grease 2. It was then called Son Of Grease, which I thought was a much better title.

I was picked for the part from a bunch of genuine teen idols who were probably much more qualified than I was.

Again, it was the momentum coming out of New York which got me the gig. I was lucky, but I also went down on the ship with that one too.

How did you feel when Grease 2 flopped?

Caulfield: I had a three picture deal with the studio, but (after Grease 2) those films disappeared into the ether.

I made the big mistake of not so much believing my own press, but going along with the fanfare.

The reality is, the studio lost faith in the picture. We opened on the same day as ET and we just got trounced. The studio immediately pulled the picture and didn't promote it.

I didn't see the writing on the wall, but Michelle Pfeiffer's agent did, very intelligently, got her into Scarface. Unfortunately, I didn't have anything in the can.

What I probably should have done is go back to New York, which is ultimately what I did do three years later, when I starred in another play where I didn't wear many clothes again.

And then I got scouted by the producers of Dynasty. New York has been very good to me.

Bedroom Farce. The Churchill, High Street, Bromley. August 23 to August 28. Call 0844 971 7620 or visit ambassadortickets.com/bromley