WHEN it comes to having quality time with your children, Simon Williams has had it in droves recently. His daughter Amy, now in her 20s, is acting in the play Nobody's Perfect at Windsor which he penned and also stars in.

"We auditioned quite a number of girls," says Simon. "When my daughter came to the audition and I was reading the lines of her father, I suddenly realised it was written about her. So there was no question that she was the best actress to play the part."

Although Simon had spent months dotting the i's and crossing the t's in his comedy, he had no idea until that moment in the audition room that subconsciously the role of the young girl was based on Amy and he had drawn on the time when she was living at home as a teenager.

"When she spoke the lines I realised in my head I was writing it about her."

Having Amy in the cast has meant that father and daughter have been thrown together and they have experienced a great bonding time.

"It's heaven working with Amy because I get to see her every day and by the end of the play she has to be an adorable daughter who loves her father, so I like that very much."

Amy no longer lives with Simon and his second wife Lucy at their Henley home but prefers to live in London.

"She has been with her boyfriend now for a while, so it is nice to get her away from him and have her all day to myself.

"It has been not so much father and daughter, which we've done obviously before, but as two grown-up actors working together. That has been really nice. I think it is terrific, especially when they are following in the footsteps of something you have enjoyed so much yourself."

Nobody's Perfect is a comedy about a writer, Myrtle Banbury, who wins a woman's romantic fiction competition, but Myrtle (Simon Williams) is a man. However to claim the prize of a publishing contract he has to meet with the feminist publisher (Stephanie Beecham) from the publishing house, Love is all Around, as a woman.

Simon came upon the idea when he decided to turn his hand to writing romantic fiction.

"I have written a couple of thrillers and I said to my agent I think I might try a blockbusting romance, and she said not under your own name. Men don't write romance. She couldn't get it looked at if it was written by a man, I'd have to write under the pseudonym of a woman.

"I thought: suppose I wrote a play about a man writing a romance, and he has to dress up as a woman because of the sexism of the romantic fiction industry."

The play was first shown under the title Kiss My Aunt at the Mill at Sonning.

"But it has undergone a lot of changes since then," he says.

Playing Myrtle can be quite an excruciating experience, laughs Simon.

"I'm already 6ft 4in. When I put on high heels I look ludicrious. It took a while for me to be able to walk on them."

The actor who first shot to fame as James Bellamy in the top 60s TV drama Upstairs, Downstairs didn't intend playing the leading role in his own play.

"You would expect it was a scenario for a really swollen head, but the truth is when it goes well I think aren't the cast brilliant and when it goes badly I think I can't write for toffee.

"It is quite hard because you have to take off one hat very positively the writing hat and put on the acting hat."

The cast also includes a close friend of Simon's, Murray Watson, who plays the part of a rascally old father.

"He was in my father's first play when he started writing plays."

Simon's father was the writer Hugh Williams.

"He wrote The Grass is Greener 50 years ago and Murray Watson was the young man in it."

Simon has been surrounded by great writing talent as Lucy's uncle is Ian Flemming, creator of James Bond.

"There is a lot to be learned from Ian Flemming he is, of course, a master story teller."

Anyone over the age of 30 will remember Simon as the heartthrob in Upstairs Downstairs. However, becoming a sex symbol wasn't the best thing that could have happened to him.

"The point about Upstairs Downstairs is that when you are a callow young actor working very slowly towards where you want to go and then you get a chance of missing out some rungs of the ladder and being catapulted into some successful programme like that, it is both a good thing and a bad thing. It gives you a new position you are not ready for. I loved making it but afterwards I didn't know whether to go on up the ladder or go back and pick up the rungs I had missed and it was at a time in my life when I made a few bad decisions.

"If I played my cards again I would go to Stratford and have a crack at heavyweight parts, but I let the moment pass. I made a lot of commercial misses and I kind of regret that. Only a little bit. I have very few regrets."

Simon went on to appear in a number of television series including First Among Equals, The Regiment and Don't Wait Up as well as stage plays in the West End.

As Simon gets a little older he finds that he prefers the life of a writer.

"I would like to earn increasingly more of my income from the pen."

Apart from plays, Simon has also written two novels, Talking Oscars and Kill the Lights, as well as various magazine and newspaper articles.

Simon writes in his study in the couple's 300-year-old rambling farmhouse near Henley where they also have cows and arable farming.

The place is just a stone's throw away from where Lucy, the daughter of Celia Johnson, grew up as a child and it was her wish that when she and Simon married they would live there.

Simon had no hesitation in moving in.

Nobody's Perfect is at the Theatre Royal, Windsor from Tuesday, January 15 to Saturday, January 19.