Karla Elliott is on the latest turn of the roller coaster that is her adventuresome and, occasionally, traumatic life. It has been a bumpy ride (divorce, high-profile break-ups and bereavement) but it has all brought her to where she is today.

The perfectly groomed glamazon is the devoted mother to 11-year-old Emily Jade. She gave up being the sex-kitten rock wife long ago. "I haven't had a date in over three years," the Irish beauty claims over lunch in the Beacon Hotel in Sandyford last Tuesday.

"Emily Jade keeps trying to get me to go out to meet people. I take great comfort in knowing that she wants me to meet someone. It is not like some kids who don't want their mother ever to meet anyone new."

Emily Jade, she adds, is an independent soul with "a wicked sense of humour".

There is much evidence to back this up. On a recent holiday to Greece, Emily Jade and her mother were having dinner in the hotel one evening. The manager came over at more-than-regular intervals to check on whether everything was to their satisfaction. As they neared the end of their main course, he suggested that there was a party in a local bar after the restaurant closed. Karla didn't seem to have picked up on any romantic intention. Over desserts he suggested the party again.

It was at this point that Emily Jade -- presumably aware that the penny still hadn't dropped with her mother -- intervened to tell her: "Mum! He wants to take you out on a date because you have big boobs."

I remember the decolletage-flaunting catsuits Karla wore around the town back in the day. I remember the night in 1992 she walked into the Horseshoe Bar with me; she was in a circulation-curtailing rigout. And how various Fianna Fail stalwarts and simpering hacks in tow made pronounced about-turns at the bar to get a better look at yer wan.

"Why do you think I want to get my body back?" Karla, who has gained some weight in intervening years (who hasn't?) laughs now. "I want to lose the weight."

I think she is grand as she is. In truth, Karla was never a waif to begin with.

Today, Karla's bosomy attributes are augmented by an ample derriere -- the Rubenesque epitome of feminine beauty -- and overall sassiness that marks her out as stunning. Hard to imagine she can't, as she claims, get a man. She laughs and suggests that TV3 or RTE should do a reality TV show about her quest to find her Mr Right. Despite her well-publicised record with men -- and it is a long list -- Karla doesn't believe that Amy Winehouse is right when she sings love is a losing game.

"I believe," she says, "my soul mate is out there for me still." Former potential soul mates, however, are another matter. Infuriatingly quixotic and evasive, Karla says she doesn't want to discuss in any detail her exes.

The buxom brunette is sketchy on dates to put it mildly. She says she can't remember when she got married to Def Leppard singer Joe Elliott ("I haven't a clue") or where they went on honeymoon if indeed they had a honeymoon at all ("I think he was in the middle of a tour"). She says she can't remember the year she broke up with Joe nor the year she took up with Conrad Gallagher or David Doane. In fairness, neither the charming chef (that's Conrad) nor the Texan millionaire with the penchant for white suits (howdy Mr Doane) were particularly important relationships for Karla.

Karla says that her time with beef baron Doane was so brief that it is not worth commenting on. When pressed about the multimillionaire, now deceased, she smiles and says that he once took her, her mother and some friends out to dinner in Shanahan's On The Green and she ended up paying. "He didn't have any money. He never had any money when he was with me," she says. "He acted like he had money."

Apropos of money, she says she loaned another ex, Conrad Gallagher, £150,000 when they were going together in 2001 and never got it back. "He knows I loaned him the money," she claims. (Conrad had no comment to make.) Long of leg and short of patience, Karla Ramdhanie was born in Dublin to an Irish mother and an Indian father, a doctor who studied in the College of Surgeons; they moved to Trinidad when Karla was two. Her parents split when she was 12 and Karla and her mother moved back to Dublin and lived in the family home in Walkinstown. She was, she says, "bullied a lot" at school because she was "different to the other girls".

This difference had its benefits. Sixteen-year-old Karla, who was strikingly beautiful -- she still is -- was walking down Grafton Street with her mother when a photographer approached her and asked if she could do a test shoot with her. Later that week she was doing a swimwear shoot for Switzers (now Brown Thomas) and her path to becoming one of Ireland's most famous models had begun. She did Pretty Polly ads, magazine covers shot by Tony Higgins and was generally the toast of le tout Pink Elephant along with the other It Girls of the mid-Eighties such as Laura Bermingham.

"I enjoyed that time," she says. "It was great fun."

In 1986, she began dating shaggy-permed metal-lite star Joe Elliott. Joe and Karla were practically next-door neighbours on Mount Merrion Avenue in Blackrock and a mutual friend played cupid and set them up on a date. The stunning model and the rock singer were immediately entranced by the reflected glory of each other. They were soon one of Ireland's most high-profile couples.

"I was madly in love with him," she says, "He was the love of my life." They married in his home town in the late Eighties. "I remember coming out of the registry office in Sheffield and looking at the wall with all the graffiti on it and going: 'This is romantic!' (Laughs) I think it was 1989? I'm not sure. I am brutal on remembering dates. I really haven't a clue what date I married Joe. That will tell you something."

It does, in spades. Originally, she recalls, it was a normal marriage. "Joe was working on an album and he would go out to work and come home," she says, referring to their house in Vico Road in Killiney.

I know Karla, on and off for almost 20 years. In 1991, I spent Christmas in Los Angeles with herself and Joe. I went for a walk with Joe along Sunset Boulevard one day and had a long chat with him about the world. I liked him a lot. I still do. Karla was vivacious and sexy. They worked well together.

I remember flying to a Def Leppard show in Phoenix, Arizona, on a private jet with them and the band for a show on New Year's Eve. We flew back straight after the show for a party at the Sunset Marquis where Karla and Joe had set up camp. It was high-octane glamour 24/7. Karla had a thing for the bling.

"There were lots of private jets and it was great fun and everything but I think you are either the type of person that adapts to whatever is going on in your life at the time or you're not. I think that's when people run into problems: when they get so caught up in something and they believe it's real," she says. "For me, I adapt to whatever is going on in my world. I travelled as a child a lot and stayed in five-star hotels with my parents. So it didn't seem odd to me, that whole life."

She says initially neither Joe nor herself wanted kids. But once Karla was married, she started thinking: 'Maybe it would be nice.'

"That," she says, "is the natural progression of any relationship. But he was adamant that he didn't want any. I think he is very much a Peter Pan-type character," she theorises. "He wants to be young and the centre of attention all the time. And if you have kids you can't be like that. You have to be not selfish. It was interesting to see other band members were having kids and we were still touring. Maybe it is a lead singer thing. It is his choice and he is entitled to it."

Karla claims it was also her husband's choice to have an affair with another woman, Bobbie Tolsma. "I was broken hearted. It was such a hazy time for me because I was in such shock."

There is a long pause. The waitress in the Beacon brings tea. "I don't want to look bitter," Karla continues. "I'm not. It is all water under the bridge... I don't give a s*** about Joe.

"I don't want to drag those emotions up because it is in my past. I look forward. I don't look back and start dwelling on things. That's not the kind of person I am."

Nobody knows what goes on in a marriage but you can gain a little insight surely by what exes say about each other in print. In an interview with VIP magazine in June 1999 (she was pictured with her then boyfriend, Dave Walsh), Karla also claimed that Joe gave Bobbie "my wedding present -- my Porsche 944". Karla says now that when she moved out she can remember Bobbie driving into the complex in the Porsche -- "it still had my name on the reg plates!" In a piece in the Daily Telegraph on June 10, 1999, journalist Neil McCormick is walked through Joe Elliott's 7,000 sq ft mansion, set high in the Dublin hills. Two of the walls are made of glass, we learn, from which Elliott can look down over his paddock -- "where his girlfriend, Bobbie, keeps two horses".

"Then there's Bobbie herself, of course," wrote McCormick, "Elliott's long-standing American girlfriend is appropriately blonde and busty, with model good looks and a preference for body-hugging designer clothes."

That is all in the past now. Joe is happily with Kristine now, whom he married in 2004. I say to Karla that the marriage break-up with Joe was a blessing in disguise because you would never have had Emily Jade if you had stayed in a marriage with a man who -- according to her -- didn't want children.

"Having Emily Jade was the best thing that ever happened to me because it showed me a lot about myself as well," she says. "I could have got pregnant if I wanted to, which I would never have done, because I figure that each person is allowed to have their freedom of choice."

In reality, Karla doesn't have any bitterness or resentment about the past. She took Emily Jade to the June 12 Def Leppard concert earlier this summer at the 02 Arena in Dublin. She didn't ring up to get on the guest list or to get backstage passes. She bought two tickets at the box office and went in.

"Emily Jade always said if ever Def Leppard are playing she wanted to go because they were such a big part of my life," Karla says. "She dragged me up the front. She was screaming and bopping and enjoying the show and I," Karla laughs, "very graciously clapped!"

Joe had no idea Karla was there, she adds. "I thought it would be a lot stranger for me not having been in that situation for a long time. Obviously I knew all the songs. I suppose it was interesting to see how I would feel. I enjoyed it."

It wasn't closure for you because presumably you would have had that many years ago, I say.

"I suppose it showed me that I didn't have any feelings either way. I didn't have any feelings of anger, or this or that, whatever. I just stood there and enjoyed the show. It was really odd because I wondered how I was going to feel ... "

Two years after she left Joe, Karla began a three-and-a-half year relationship with Dave Walsh. They had a child together, Emily Jade. "Dave and I had a relationship but it didn't work out, but had a lovely child," she says. "We didn't see eye to eye and that is what happens when people break up." Dave, who is the head of security for Louis Murray at La Stampa on Dawson Street, was recently diagnosed with Parkinson's. "I burst into tears when he told me," Karla says.

Her whole life now appears centred entirely around Emily Jade. She talks about her devotedly. They live in Blackrock with their dog, Lola. Karla shows the picture of Lola on her Blackberry. She is off to pick Emily up from school and to cook the lunch.

"I love to cook. I love Nigella [Lawson] and the way she cooks. I have the same passion for food as her," Karla says. "I enjoy food." Despite this love, Karla says she is on a mission to watch what she eats and shape up by joining the Ski Centre in Sandyford. She is starting to see the results of her intense ski sessions three times a week with ski guru Jane McGarry, who is, says Karla, a Euro Ski Pro Level 4 -- "the highest qualification in ski instruction that exists"; and Tamsen McGarry, who "has a Masters from Oxford Brookes in nutrition".

In The Beauty Myth, American author Naomi Wolf writes that "33,000 American women told researchers that they would rather lose 10 to 15 pounds than achieve any other goal. More women have more money and power and scope and legal recognition than we have ever had before; but in terms of how we feel about ourselves physically, we may actually be worse off than our unliberated grandmothers."

I wonder aloud why Karla -- who is proof that big is beautiful -- wants to lose the weight at all. Doesn't she feel there is too much pressure on women to conform to an unrealistic stereotype of beauty: photo-shopped size-zero skinniness. "That will always be around but I am going by my fitness levels and by the weight for my height. I am overweight. I can't fit into my jeans. I can't get into my clothes. I don't like the way I look."

She says the weight gain over the years has come about because she hasn't been exercising, because she hasn't had the time. "I was mourning my mum, who died three years ago. I was comfort eating. I felt out of shape."

More recently, Karla decided she was going to start a huge makeover on herself. "I want my figure back. I am ready to dust myself off and re-invent myself and get my sass back."

You never lost it.

"Thank you!" she smiles. "But I am on a mission to lose a few pounds." In August 2006, Karla lost her beloved mother, Victoria, who passed away suddenly. Karla was with Emily Jade when she found the body. "Mum was such a huge part of my life -- and Emily's," she says forlornly. "We were so, so close. It was a very difficult time. My mother stayed with me five nights a week. She was my best buddy. Just as Emily Jade is now."

The Ski Centre, 26 Rowan Avenue, Stillorgan/Sandyford Business Park, Dublin 18 Tel: 01 2930588 www.skicentre.ie

- Barry Egan

Sunday Independent