THE Marchioness of Worcester, former actress Tracy Ward, is a woman obsessed. She lives on the Duke of Beaufort’s Badminton House estate and believes in organic farms fertilised with human manure. She cycles around the countryside wearing a Rajisthani skirt and fiddles with Ladakh prayer beads. To save water, she doesn’t flush the loo after she pees. Her life makes gossip columnists gleeful. She was expelled from school after smacking the deputy headmistress, did a sexy cabaret act, stripping to black camisole, in rough London pubs, posed nude for Norman Parkinson and dated heroin-addicted Etonians. Tracy’s sister is the actress Rachel, her mother is married to Lord ‘call girl’ Lambton and Tracy married Harry ‘Bunter’ Worcester, heir to the Duke of Beaufort’s fortune. Phew! In the past few years, Tracy has metamorphosed. She’s now Mother Tracy, the tireless charity worker and Green person. She’s a trustee of Friends of the Earth, The Gaia Foundation (works with indigenous people in forest areas), Transport 2000 (to reverse the Government’s £23 billion road programme, improve public transport and cut down pollution) and the Schumacher Society (lectures by eminent environmentalists).

She agreed to be interviewed only if we talked about Gatt, the EC, cost benefit analyses in our economic system, unbridled capitalism and suchlike. I’d just returned from a trip to Venezuela. ‘Did you stay with many tribal people?’ she asked, hopefully.

Now we meet. She should live in a grass hut, but wants to work within the system so resides in upper-class splendour in a lodge with oil paintings. Outside, her A-reg BMW sports anti-nuke stickers. She walks with amazing grace, is ethereal and wears that Rajisthani skirt (originally her protest vote against the plight of Ethiopian cotton workers, she won’t buy things that undermine other communities’ health) and a large emerald ring and Rolex watch. She’s beautiful, sexy, pouty and speaks with a just-woken-up breathlessness.

She offers coffee or ginger, then nips off to collect her daughter Bella on her bike, telling me, big-heartedly, to eat an apple or raid the fridge. Now we talk in the peaceful, grand sitting room. She’s just sent 2,000 (‘to everybody I know’) Friends of the Earth application forms, out of her own money and time. ‘They’ve all told me they’re really concerned with the environment. So I’ve made it easy for them.’

She’s happily married, but her husband doesn’t share her views and the relationship isn’t very Green. What makes her marriage work? ‘I guess we love each other,’ she says simply. ‘There’s mutual respect, independence and we share a lot too. My being an ecologist, caring about trees, African people, Gatt and the way that we consume doesn’t interfere with that.’ She speaks characteristically with a faraway look in her eyes, as if she’s in her own world.

SO ASK her, say, what she’d like to do one day with Badminton. ‘My vision of it is irrelevant. Forget it! It’s his. We live in a patriarchal society and all the decisions about money and property rest with the man.’ Or about children: Bobby, five, and Bella, two; surely an ideal number in terms of population explosion? ‘Don’t let’s go into this … I’d like two and Harry would like three. So we’ll have three. But I don’t want to make the article a battle between …’

Bella was born on the NHS. ‘If you have money and are spoilt, you pay through the nose for something which is well supplied by the NHS. Also I didn’t want just to be among people who can afford to be in an expensive hospital. I wanted to give the money I’d have spent at the Portland to the Gaia Foundation,’ she says.

‘But you could have done that anyway.’

‘Yuh, I could have. But I do as well. It was just that ideally I wanted Harry to give what he would’ve paid for the Portland. But it didn’t work that way,’ she says. ‘I never asked him.’

Her children are educated privately. ‘But I want them to understand there is more to life than making money and satisfying shareholders.’ And if Bobby so desires, she’ll take him hunting. Isn’t there a contradiction here? ‘No. Because I don’t see how we can get people who work in the cities and make decisions about property and motorways to really love the countryside unless they are out in it. Most of these people don’t come to the countryside unless they’re hunting.’

Her environmentalism is an obsession. Why? She tortures her hair. She says she doesn’t feel the spiritual emptiness that she thinks many in the West suffer. ‘I just feel I have a real craving for learning, maybe because I didn’t work hard enough as a child.’

She finds it tricky to talk about her childhood. ‘In the past I’ve had my nanny and mother ring up in tears.’ She was bought up in an Oxfordshire manor by her nanny in a nursery, saw her parents rarely, and went to boarding school aged 11. ‘I was always being chucked out. I’d had enough of discipline at home. I didn’t work very hard, or concentrate. I couldn’t take people telling me what to do.

‘You should have guidance and love from your immediate family or community. My mother was off doing her own thing, it was the fashion then. I don’t feel my parents and nanny gave me any direction,’ she says, slowly. ‘At school you’re just one of 300 people and don’t have enough identity.’ She might have discovered her identity in acting, but found it egotistical and self-obsessive. ‘Also I felt vulnerable having started so late.’ It’s hard now to imagine her as the raunchy cabaret stripper. An easy target, the alternative Marchioness is commonly dismissed as an old hippy and accused of being ineffectual. She maintains that money and title are not important, but knows both make it easier for her to hold her opinions. She can be naive (idealised visions of spiritually happy tribal people) but she’s hard-working and her intentions are extremely good. She seems to have found herself through helping other people and if she’s worthy, why the hell not!