On April 23, 1959, Paula Yates was born to former Blackpool beauty queen Elaine Smith, turned Bluebell Girl Heller Toren, and Jess Yates, TV presenter of Stars on Sunday. She was conceived during the honeymoon according to her mother.

It was not until 1997 that DNA testing revealed that Yates was the daughter of Hughie Green, of the 70s TV show Opportunity Knocks, by which time both Green and Yates were dead.

The seeds of a lifetime search for approbation, both public and private, as television personality, rock chick, and high-profile earth mother were already sown when she moved from North Wales, which she described in her 1995 autobiography as ''living in squalor'', to London's emerging punk scene in 1976.

She became so unashamedly keen on the Boomtown Rats singer Bob Geldof that his friends give her the nickname ''the limpet'', but by 1978 she was causing a stir in her own right by posing naked in London's Reform Club for Penthouse and published a book of photographs, called Rock Stars In Their Underpants, hailed as ''the greatest work of art in the last decade'' by Andy Warhol.

However, it was as co-host, with Jools Holland, of Channel 4's groundbreaking music show The Tube, in 1982 that Yates made her name.

The birth of her first child with Bob Geldof, Fifi Trixibelle, who was to set the family trend for outlandish names, in 1984, provided a new career opportunity. Yates wrote and presented the TV series Baby, Baby on Channel 4, but the advice to mothers to stay at home with their infants was regarded with some resentment, since Yates herself was clearly not prepared to desert the television studio for the kitchen sink: she continued to present The Tube until 1987.

In June 1986, Yates and Bob Geldof married in Las Vegas after 10 years together. After the birth of her second daughter Peaches, in October 1990, Yates wrote a book on motherhood, called The Fun Starts Here. A third daughter, Pixie, was born. The partnership with Geldof - to all appearances happy and bringing the sobriquet of the First Couple of Rock - also became a shared professional commitment in 1992. Yates became a presenter on Channel 4's The Big Breakfast, a show made by Planet 24, in which Geldof was a partner. Her trademark was interviewing celebrity guests on a giant bed.

It was not enough. One of her guests in January 1995 was Australian rock singer Michael Hutchence. Their affair, she claimed later, began ''30 minutes after the interview''. In February she left Geldof for Hutchence, describing him as ''God's gift to women'' and ensuring instant and recurring attention from the tabloids for the INXS frontman who was regarded in Britain as having seduced Paula Yates away from ''Saint'' Bob Geldof.

In May 1996, the Geldofs' marriage ends in a divorce which had been a bitter contest until agreement was reached with a public statement on shared custody and continued good relations. They swopped homes, with Yates, heavily pregnant with Hutchence's child, returning to her old matrimonial house in Chelsea, while Geldof moved into Hutchence's home 270 yards away.

In 1996, their daughter, Heavenly Hiraani Tiger Lily, was born. Despite Paula's claims that the couple were to have been married in January 1998, close Australian friends have said that was never on Hutchence's agenda.

Later that year, while Yates and Hutchence were in Australia, the children's nannie found opium in a Smarties tube in their home. The couple claim the drugs were planted and Yates was arrested but not charged, but the incident allowed Geldof to return to court and win temporary custody of the children.

The revelation about Yates' parentage was not helped when her mother, who now lives near Marseilles in France, maintained she met Green in a London around 1966 when Paula was already a young girl. She claimed that when Paula was born, she and Yates had been desperately trying for a child and that she was not having any affairs at that point. When the rumour first surfaced, Yates herself thought it extremely unlikely, although she had already revealed that the childhood in which she thought Jess Yates was her father had not been happy.

In her autobiography, she revealed that she felt unloved and unwanted and that a particular misery was being made to sit on a wooden box listening to Jess Yates playing hymns on an organ. Her experiments with sex and drugs began while she was a teenager - as her parents' marriage fell apart.

Her own life fell apart dramatically when Hutchence was found dead in his hotel room in Sydney in November 1997. Despite the verdict of suicide, Paula insisted that her lover had died as a result of auto-erotic asphyxiation which had gone wrong.

It was a stance - in which she used a television programme to plead her cause a la Diana - which dashed much of the public sympathy which followed the double blow of her lover's death and the revelation about her parentage.

She was admitted to a psychiatric clinic with depression in April 1998 and in June she once more lost custody of Fifi, Peaches, and Pixie and was admitted to the Priory rehabilitation clinic after trying to hang herself. She was to have five residential visits during which she met several young men she later dated, including Scots rock star Finlay Quaye.

She was prey to kiss-and-tell lovers. One claimed that she slept with Hutchence's ashes.

In March last year, Yates attempted a TV comeback as host of An Evening With Jerry Springer. Both Springer and the audience were bewildered by a series of strange questions from Yates and the show was a complete flop.

Yet in April this year, with the approach of her 40th she said; ''I think the worst is definitely over'', as she embarked on a new career move as agony aunt for a new magazine, Aura.

n Paula Yates had ridden a ''rollercoaster'' of emotions in recent years, dealing with more trauma than most people deal with in a lifetime, a family psychologist said yesterday.

Dr Anne Sheppard said it was impossible to tell just how Yates's turbulent life had affected her mind.

''She has been divorced, had someone dear to her commit suicide, and discovered her real father was not the man who brought her up.''

Dr Sheppard said Yates's problems seemed to start with her divorce from Geldof.

''Her separation from Bob Geldof is likely to have been terribly painful, not in the least because it was so highly publicised.

''These things are not even easy to deal with in private, so having to go through something like that in the public eye would be more traumatic. Whether she was a stable person or not, I can't say. But I suspect she was not.''

The news that former TV favourite Hughie Green, below, had fathered her would also have taken its toll, said Dr Sheppard.

''It is likely she felt she had been deceived.''

Ronald Tulloch, a consultant psychologist at Stockton Hall Hospital, York, said it was possible Hutchence's death had the greatest impact on Yates.

''I am sure her divorce from Bob Geldof was not pleasant, but she was already with someone else by that time so that would have softened the blow,'' he said.

''But Michael's suicide could even have led to Paula blaming herself for his death.

''Having a death like that close to you would bring in elements of self-blame, doubt and guilt.

''It is possible she never recovered from that.''