Sitting at a glass table in a half-empty apartment in Beverly Hills, a Canadian actress and singer named Robey loosens her vocal cords with a song line from One Night in Bangkok.

"One night in Bangkok, and the world's your oyster - the bars are temples but the girls ain't free, and if you're lucky the God's a she. I can feel an angel sliding up to me," she sings in a vibrant voice.

"Pretty weird song," she concludes.

During her own similarly strange and eventual life, she sang that cover of an original song from the rock opera, Chess. Her 1985 cover version climbed into the top 10 on Billboard Magazine's dance charts while hitting No. 1 in Latin America and Europe.

Now, the 26-year-old Robey - a single-name moniker derived from her given name of Louise Robey - is the sensual attraction of the television series, Friday the 13th. The series is being filmed and produced in Toronto and it will have its premiere in Canada this fall.

The television series shares little with its "slice 'n dice" namesake series of horror movies. Its premise is that two cousins take over their uncle's antique shop only to find out that he made a pact with the devil and the objects he sold are cursed. Each episode is a quest to retrieve one of the murderous objects - a tea cup that poisons a drinker, a pen that has the power of fatal prophecy.

"A great little show," says Robey who has a great mane of red hair. The story-book strangeness of the show and its startling twists mirror the life of a headstrong young Robey.

"When you're young, you think you're immortal," says Robey who left her home in Ottawa out of high school. "I left for France," she says, snapping her fingers to show the impulsive nature of the decision. "It changed my whole life."

Her father, a former Canadian air-force pilot, and her mother, a singer, did not object. She pursued a man to the town of Aix-en-Provence in southern France. He refused to even see her. A young girl with only a few hundred dollars, she was taken by the taxi driver to the ritziest hotel in Aix.

What comes through clearly in Robey's tale is an attraction to a bright and intense life. "I can travel in all sorts of circles ... I can play a society girl and at the same time the down and dirtiest rock'n roll star you ever seen in your life."

At the hotel in southern France, the beautiful young Canadian was an instant hit. She mingled with the wealthy French on vacation there and became somewhat of a mascot at the hotel, posing for its publicity photos and receiving free room and board.

The Paris opera came into town, she recalls, and, by the pool, she saw an 85-year-old man snapping photos of her with a pocket camera. He turned out to the famous French photographer, Jacques Henri Lartigue, who was accompanying the opera.

His photo of the thin, long-limbed, topless 17-year-old running through a wheat field appeared in Paris Match with a caption saying he intended to make a top model of the young girl. Two months later, he published a 12-page series of photos of Robey in French Vogue.

With that success, she moved to Paris and later hooked up with director Roman Polanski.

After a moment's hesitation, Robey denies a magazine report that she was living with the director. "We were friends," she says. "I met a lot of people through him."

She gets up to find a cigarette. "I think certain people are geniuses," she says, taking a puff. "I wish I had some of those qualities. All you can hope is they will be your friend and you will learn a lot. He was open to anything."

At the time, Polanski and Nastassia Kinski had just completed Tess and Lartigue saw the two women as a pair, she recalled, calling Kinski the little cat and Robey the little rabbit.

Despite support from Lartigue and his wife, Robey's career continued to rise and fall. "I would sing in the subways during the day," she recalls, "and get the red carpet treatment at night."

After two years in France, she returned to New York with the new wave band, Louise and the Creeps. But the band quickly broke up and she worked in a Greek diner on Long Island for a time, before recording six solo singles and returning to modelling.

In 1984, she began an acting career with small roles in The Money Pit and Raw Deal.

Her agent pressed her to move to Los Angeles to pursue her acting career and she made the switch just last year, now dividing her time between Los Angeles and Toronto, where the Friday the 13th series is produced and filmed.

Now in its second year in the United States, the series is now rated No. 2 among young men in the national U.S. syndication market, after Star Trek: The Next Generation. It is No. 4 among young women, after Star Search.

The show is moving to prime-time in Los Angeles and New York and appears to have started a trend of television horror. Two new U.S. shows, Freddy's Nightmares and Monsters, are starting in the fall and a new series of Twilight Zone episodes are in production.

The few reviewers that have written about Friday the 13th are generally favourable, one saying it "presents some satisfying, intelligent entertainment" with special effects that "are superb, ranging from borderline gruesome to deftly intriguing."

But that success and the various rises and falls of the past - as model, singer, actress - have overwhelmed Robey's personal life. "It's the same old story with me and men," she told a reviewer last year. "I like them, but I get very intense about my work. There's no time for anybody. I have only time for me."

The fury of some of those relationships now comes up in passing when she refers to one boy friend who ripped the head off her favourite stuffed animal and threw the pieces into an incinerator. Another "ex," as she refers to them, kept her signed originals by Lartigue.

"The number of things I've lost to jealous boy friends," she says regretfully. "They burn them, they rip them."

At 26, she is no longer the young ingenue who can become famous by hanging around the right swimming pool. Her university has been the university of life, she says.

Across the street, the long-limbed silhouette of a young girl can be seen through the venetian blinds of an elegant apartment. The silhouette is leaping energetically to music, strikingly reminiscent of a photo of a 17-year-old Canadian running through a wheat field.