She was designed for Ibsen and Chekhov, for the way she conveys absolute eroticism, sadness, the missed opportunity… what’s lost.”That last quality makes her the perfect choice for her latest role as the pilot searching for a missing child in Ellen McLaughlin’s moving Tongue of a Bird. There’s nothing mystical about this, it’s just that she has the most amazing verbal dexterity, more than any actor I’ve ever worked with.” Minghella agrees “She’s completely earthed, grounded from the text As a writer you long for people like that. When Deborah comes on stage you suddenly feel there’s a real person present because she has a wonderful gravity It’s not like a character talking She takes a writer’s language and makes it her own.

“The whole thing about theatre is that it’s live,” she insists “With comedy, you know when an audience is held. I think it was Edith Evans who said, ‘The great skill is not to make people laugh, but to make them laugh when you want them to.’ You know they’re going to have a really good time in a minute, and it’s great!”Paul Godfrey directed her in his Benjamin Britten play Once in a While the Odd Thing Happens “Audiences have an automatic empathy with her Commonly, you see actors acting. Years ago she fronted the band in Martin Duncan’s legendary Stratford East panto A Night in Old Peking as lunatic Bloomsbury-eccentric Dame ffrog. Her screaming (and screamingly funny) performance in The Clandestine Marriage, opposite Nigel Hawthorn, was likened to a 19th- century version of Violet Elizabeth Bott. That’s why she’s good, she’s always on top of a role.”He’s not making light of her gifts when he adds, “she’s interested in giving people a good time, in entertaining them.”It’s a surprising diagnosis for an actress famous for suffering on stage and screen Hilda in Stanley suffered from page one. The nearest she’s got to prime-time viewing was playing a distraught mother in Casualty, for goodness sake “I know,” she pleads. “I love comedy.” There’s an almost wicked glint in her eye as she admits that she knows she can make people laugh It’s true.

Ley believes her strength lies in the fact that she’s basically a comedienne “She sees a character’s comic potential. She was Ruby Dubois, in A-line skirts and little red tops with bunny fur trim.” They spent an entire season at Bracknell writing and performing hour-long cabarets on different topics each week. “She was very dedicated, but she had this terrible conflict between whether to teach or act,” remembers Ley. “When she finally decided to leave, it gave her a strong impetus to get on.” The pair of them joined up with fellow graduate David Stafford (now a journalist) and became Charlie’s Ritzy Cabaret.

Fellow actor Stephen Ley cast her as Georgina, the mad Salvation Army officer in Edward Bond’s Narrow Road to the Deep North. “It was the best performance anyone had seen at the university,” he recalls, quick as a flash. After Leeds, her next audience was a primary school in Giggleswick, where she worked as a teacher. Faced with the question of why she isn’t a household name, she blames herself “I think I’m shy… no, wary of all that publicity,” she replies, rather reticently “I’ve just done the work that has interested me. I have to be excited by the piece.” It’s striking that she immediately talks about plays, not roles.

Only later does she talk about needing to connect with a character in some way. “It’s something to do with heart,” she says, thoughtfully.If that gives you the impression of a woolly minded sentimentalist, think again, though, by her own admission, she never trained properly “I learned my craft [a favourite word] along the way I’ve always played I’ve always made-believe. I didn’t know how you could be an actor, but I just loved playing Pretending to be other people.”She stops herself. A smile whips across her sharp features and she laughs, skittishly, “I suppose that says rather a lot about me.”Instead of going to drama school, she read English at Leeds University in the late Sixties, where Jack Straw was President of the Union Even back then, her talent stood out.