Trudie Styler: Mrs Sting

She spends her days practising Ashtanga yoga and tantric sex; she eats only organic; she's keen on rainforests and would like, if at all possible, to save the planet. Oh, and her husband is a global pop superstar whose social conscience is almost as big as his bank balance.

If you believe the myth, the world of Mrs Gordon Sumner, better known as Mrs Sting, better known as Trudie Styler, the actress, film producer and long-standing grande dame of rock'n'roll wifery, is fine, dandy, and full of peace, man.

Read the interviews, and you'll marvel at her serene humanity, while possibly feeling queasy during the bits where she talks about her love life or attempts to convince us that she's too laid-back to deserve that diva reputation.

Cast an eye over her Hello! shoots, and your mouth will water at the Old Masters, Persian rugs, and "real" log fires that jollify her family mansion overlooking St James's Park. Leaf through her CV, and you'll wonder how she fits it all in: trophy wife, mother, actor and eminent film producer.

And let us not forget the charity work. At 52 years old, she's still campaigning tirelessly on behalf of children in Ecuador, or human rights in China, or those photogenic Amazon tribes that Sting likes to visit in his Gulfstream jet. Beautiful, bountiful Trudie: the enduring "face" of celebrity kindness.

Or maybe not. In Winchester this week, an employment tribunal heard the angry testimony of Jane Martin, a former chef at Mr and Mrs Sting's country seat in Wiltshire, who is suing her former employers for sexual discrimination.

Styler, she said, is a short-tempered tyrant with an army of domestic flunkies whose behaviour is "entirely driven by fear". She bullies staff, so the headline writers surmised, in order to make her "feel royal".

The panel will consider these claims - hotly contested, it must be said, by the Sting household - and deliver a written verdict at a later date. A separate tribunal has already ruled that Martin was unfairly dismissed, after becoming pregnant. But whatever the outcome, this week's brouhaha has come at an awkward time for both Styler and her husband, who are in the middle of one of their occasional major forays into the public eye.

Sting recently reunited The Police, the band with which he first achieved fame, 23 years after they split. He played a comeback gig at last month's Grammys and is shortly to embark on a world tour.

Styler, meanwhile, may be about to endure problems closer to home. In the Soho drinking dens where film industry types like to spread scurrilous gossip, serious questions are being asked about Xingu Films, the production company she founded in the mid-1990s, and which runs her UK office. The firm, which last week held a glittering premiere for its new film A Guide to Recognising Your Saints, starring Robert Downey Jnr, is a month late filing financial returns at Companies House. Its most recent accounts, for the year to April 2005, reveal £3m of debt, and losses of half a million a year.

Take a close look at the world of Sting's perfectly preserved trophy wife, then, and things aren't always what they seem. For all the lovely homes, and the best friends such as Dustin Hoffman, Bill Clinton and Madonna, her life is far more than interiors, charity work, Ashtanga yoga, and Tantric sex.

Styler has been a fixture on the red-carpet circuit for so long now - she's been married to Sting for nearly 15 years, and with him almost 29 - that it's easy to forget that she began life on a Birmingham council estate in 1955. Her mother was a school dinner lady, and her father worked in a factory. In interviews, she often recalls being knocked over and seriously injured by a bread van at the age of three, an accident that lies behind her schoolgirl nickname Scarface.

Playing the Angel Gabriel in a school nativity play was "a wonderful feeling, because of the attention", and at 14 she decided to act. She trained at Bristol Old Vic before joining the RSC, and by the late 1970s had achieved minor fame as a TV actress, with solid roles in dramas such as Poldark and The Bell.

Then everything changed. In 1982, she met Sting, a working-class singer from the North-east who was just hitting the big time. He lived in the house next door in Bayswater, and when they met it was "love at first sight". One thing, as they say, soon led to another.

A big problem stood in their way, though: Sting was already married, to another actress and acquaintance of Trudie called Frances Tomelty. His extra-marital affair eventually became public, and was blamed for leading to the break-up of The Police in 1984.

Yet in the years that followed the couple managed to defy the critics. Today, they sign their cheques "Styler-Sumner", have four children, educated at nearby Marlborough College, and are partners in a high-profile marital institution in which she describes herself as his "cornerstone".

At their wedding in 1992, the bride wore a £20,000 Versace dress and rode off into the sunset on a white horse. Trudie has always been a romantic old sop at heart; she loves matchmaking, and famously introduced Madonna to Guy Ritchie.

The marriage has endured some well-chronicled ups and downs (she jokes about being a "control freak" with both her husband and staff) but successfully weathered the normal trials of a modern celebrity union.

"Trudie is very proud of the fact that they both come from similar backgrounds, and says it's one of the things that has kept them together," says the writer Wensley Clarkson, who will shortly publish an unauthorised biography, Sting and The Police - Together Again.

"They do have huge rows from time to time, but her world does revolve around Sting, and she's surprisingly tolerant of, for instance, the way he sometimes ends up in strip clubs. She's a tall, imposing woman, and I can see how she comes over as being high-faluting or bombastic, but her behaviour to staff is probably a reflection of wanting to keep him happy."

Today, Styler enjoys the benefits of a fortune that affords homes in New York, Los Angeles and London, together with Lake House, a Jacobean mansion and 800-acre estate in Wiltshire, and a magnificent Tuscan villa. She became an eco-warrior before it was fashionable, creating the Rainforest Foundation in the late 1980s (it now raises £800,000 a year) and is an ambassador for Unicef, the holy grail of celebrity good causes.

Her charms and address book can drum up millions of dollars at the drop of a hat. Yet Styler can still get a tricky press. In interviews, often under a watchful eye of a PR flunky, she may seem a touch aristocratic, or even "regal", to borrow from last week's headlines.

Maybe she'll pose in one of those magnificent dwellings, espousing the virtues of the organic oils and honey from Lake House, available at Harrods. Or she'll take up a Nigella Lawson brief, discussing her book Cooking from Lake House Organic Farm, and dropping holier-than-thou comments about how, despite everything, she still hasn't forgotten her roots.

Then there have been the tabloid stitch-ups. The popular press remains salaciously obsessed with Sting and Styler's love life, and the five-hour sex sessions they have previously boasted about. Critics mock the organic beetroot juice and expensive yoga that have helped Styler to blossom into a glamorous fifty-something, and note, mischievously, that only Sting (and not his wife) is deemed important enough to merit an entry in Who's Who.

Sometimes, it gets more personal. Last year, a former chauffeur, Mick Madadi, sold a nasty story to the News of the World, claiming that Mr and Mrs Sting had frequent marital rows over cash, and that their relationship was strained by Styler's close relationship to Ryan Spielman, a yoga teacher.

Close friends such as Bob Geldof or Simon Astaire - the PR guru who was best man at the couple's wedding - insist, however, that the Trudie Styler who appears in that and similar write-ups is unrecognisable from the real thing.

"I'll give you an example of something that sums up Trudie," said Astaire yesterday. "Last summer, I was walking in their garden in Wiltshire, and I was talking to Sting, and I said, 'Sting, this is the most incredible, beautiful garden I've ever seen. It's glorious.' And he replied. 'It's all Trudie. It's her energy that created it.'

"That really defines Trudie. She has tremendous energy that holds no bounds. It can be misinterpreted, but she's fundamentally just a good person, and her energy is often directed to those less fortunate than her."

It seems likely, then, that Styler will raise a quizzical eyebrow at this week's events, before getting back to the serious business of running Sting's life and being a film mogul and Nice Person. Despite its finances, Xingu Films will continue its valuable work, backing small, unfashionable projects. Sting, who has already lent it £2m, will be there if needed to finance its "big plans" for the future.

And whatever the couple's former staff might say, you get the impression that this beautiful, bountiful face of celebrity kindness will always retain both her marriage, and - crucially - her sense of humour.

"Trudie's biggest problem is spending; she can spend for Britain," Sting once cheekily told an interviewer. "No I don't," replied her wife, in a quip that rather sums her up. "I spend for Europe."

A Life in Brief

BORN 6 January 1955, in Birmingham, to a factory worker and a school dinner lady.

FAMILY Met Gordon Sumner, aka Sting, in 1982; they were married in 1992, and have four children: Mickey, Jake, Coco, and Giacomo.

EDUCATION Local grammar school, Bristol Old Vic, RSC.

CAREER Actress: Poldark (TV) 1975, La Sposa Americana (film) 1986, Alpha Male (film) 2006. Producer: Moving the Mountain (1994), Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels (1998), A Guide to Recognising Your Saints (2007).

AWARDS Heartland Film Festival Crystal Heart and International Documentary Association award, both for Moving the Mountain.

SHE SAYS "I am Sting's front. The noise around him, the ideas person, the person with focus."

THEY SAY "She's in constant pursuit to make the world a better place. It sounds clichéd, but it's true. I have the highest regard for her." - Simon Astaire, friend