It must have been about this time of year in 1974 when I walked into the girl’s changing room at the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama in London, and was met with the sight of a sobbing girl in a crumpled heap on the floor. I recognised her as a first year ( I was in the third) and had a vague idea that she was “that American girl”. My overwhelming memory is of her shuddering little shoulders and the huge tears that rolled from her pretty brown eyes as she turned towards this stranger who had put an arm around her and pulled her up from the floor. It took some time to find out what on earth was the matter. The truth, when it came, was unexpected.

It being the last day of term, Carrie had thrown a party at her fabulous third floor Chelsea flat for the whole first-year class. Much alcohol, all donated by her, had been drunk, and the revelry was at its peak when a grand piano somehow got shoved through the vast window on to the railings below. Mercifully, no one was killed – after all, it was two in the morning – but the police arrived, and the party broke up, leaving our sweet, generous hostess to deal with the mess. She had been due to fly back to New York that morning, but had to cancel her flight and deal with, among other things, a very unhappy landlord.

I don’t remember doing more than listen to her. Perhaps I made a few helpful phone calls to assuage various ruffled feathers and enable her to fly home as soon as possible.

Christmas came and went, and we returned to Central for the spring term, where I discovered, in my pigeonhole, a scrawled note from Carrie, written in a round, slightly childlike hand. Could she take me to the Cosmo one day for tea, to thank me for my kindness? The Cosmo, as many will recall, was the brilliant eastern European cafe on the Finchley Road, where we regularly flocked. It was run by Pepe, who kept the peace, anticipating orders and flirting with the fur-cradled, lipstick-laden ladies while skating across the floor to deliver millefeuilles, held high aloft in one hand. It was the beginning of a beautiful friendship.

We laughed so much, sending each other up. She mercilessly teased my naive Englishness. In exchange, I propped up her vulnerability. I was a shoulder to cry on and also someone who refused to be bought. This was a departure, it seemed. I was constantly stunned by Carrie’s generosity, refusing it often, which seemed to move her. She insisted on taking me to New York. I stayed in her apartment and we had a wonderful Christmas together, on one occasion driving through the snow to Connecticut with her dear friends Brian and Ted to find a blue fir tree. “But will it be blue?” I asked. I can hear her now, echoing it back to me, pursing her lips in imitation: “Will it be blue? Is it blue?’’ She laughed joyously at my earnestness. This became our catchphrase.

We skated at Rockefeller Center, danced in jazz clubs and partied with her lovely friends. When I kept saying I couldn’t afford it, she knew I meant it. She would hug me and say: “But I can,” and we laughed until we fell over, impersonating each other.

On one glorious evening years later, we were celebrating her birthday at Sardi’s in New York, with 25 people at least. I had established that I would only come if she let me pay my own way, which I could barely afford. The waiter arrived with the bill and Carrie called for a toast to me, and my generosity, since I was “footing the entire bill”. You could have lit a candle with the twinkle in her eyes. Of course, I blushed and said I would. But she had already paid up. This was her wicked impish humour – not cruel, just loving and very, very naughty.

She gave me beautiful expensive gifts, jewellery and clothes. I gave her a little antique enamel Tutankhamun pendant that had belonged to my grandmother. She cried because it had belonged to my family. I remember being surprised and thrilled that I could give her something that had value.

There were times when she stepped over a mark, like the night she rang me, crying, at 2am and asked me to come and comfort her. When I got there, she opened the door a crack and said she had a man with her and I was no longer needed. I tore her off such a strip the next day, and she never took me for granted again.

Carrie came to my family’s house in Highgate. Sitting on the kitchen table, swinging her legs, she was silent, watching my mother cook.

“Could I make that, do you think, Jill?”

“Of course,” came the reply. “I could help, if you like.”

“Oh, I would like that very much,” she said and then fell about laughing when we told her it was called shepherd’s pie.

This moment struck home. My mother was not the earth mother Carrie had assumed she was, but she was good enough. The simple nature of cooking lunch in a kitchen was something perhaps I had taken for granted. To Carrie it meant a huge amount. The relationship between Carrie and her mother, Debbie, is well documented. Carrie battled with whether or not she herself was good enough, as many of us do. To those of us who knew and loved her, she was wildly good enough, and more.