THIS third and final audience with a distinguished actor, in aid of the theatre’s triple anniversary fund-raising appeal, followed Geraldine McEwan and Edward Fox sharing their experiences and anecdotes with Richard Digby Day, the world-renowned stage director and lecturer in theatre and dramatic art.

Elieen Atkins will be 80 in June. Looking petite and beautiful in a crisp navy suit with matching patterned blouse, Atkins has a gentle air of confidence with a sprinkle of prim and proper and rather fabulous legs.

Digby Day started the ball rolling with a question about Atkins’ relationship with the Georgian. “A friend and I were staying locally and we heard about the theatre and I remember coming to see it.

There were grain bags down there,” she points to the audience seated in the pits.

“I fell in love with it then and, in 1963 when I was 29, I appeared on this stage for the first time. It was in a touring production of The Provoked Wife and we weren’t a very happy company, but the minute we got here, we knew exactly how to play it.”

With the inevitable “when did you first know you wanted to be an actress?’ Atkins settles cat-like into her upright, Georgian chair and becomes the delightful storyteller. “When I was a child, we lived in a Tottenham council house. My mother worked in a factory during the day and at night she was a barmaid at the Elephant and Castle. I didn’t really have any aspirations.

However, one day a gypsy woman came to the door selling lucky heather and clothes pegs. She saw me and told my mother I would become a famous dancer. So mother promptly enrolled me in a dance class.

“I was three and I hated it. I remember screaming a lot. By the time I was 12, I was in professional panto in Clapham; I had one line to recite and someone told my mother I had a terrible cockney accent.”

Atkins’ mother was appalled. Speech lessons were far too expensive, but at secondary school one of her teachers saw potential and he drilled away at the Cockney accent without charge.

“At secondary school, I got the part of Alice in Alice in Wonderland, my first part in a play. I had a brilliant teacher, in fact it’s teachers who have led me through my career and I am grateful to all of them.”

Atkins met and married her first husband, Julian Glover, when she was 21. After drama school, the couple moved to Stratford where Glover got a job at the then Stratford Memorial Theatre. “We both auditioned, he got a part, but I didn’t. I was so desperate to work in the theatre, I started off as an usherette. Eventually, with a bit of pestering from Julian, I got a walk-on part in As You Like It. Dame Peggy Ashcroft was playing Rosalind. I remember thinking at the time, my God she’s 57, that’s old. I dreamed of playing Rosalind, but at the time I desperately wanted to play the part of Audrey and only really got to do it because the understudy was ill and I’d learned all the words when I heard there might be an opportunity.”

Atkins got to play Rosalind with the Royal Shakespeare Company in 1973.

This autumn, she will be performing at Stratford again under the direction of new artistic director Greg Doran. “He told me it was that production that made him want to be a theatre director.”

Asked about television, Atkins says: “Honest, because I’m old and I can tell it like it is nowadays, I do television for money, but I don’t like it. It’s a hard medium for the actor, it’s all about the director.”

Atkins wrote Upstairs Downstairs with her actress friend Jean Marsh. The idea came to them while they were watching The Forsyte Saga. “You never saw the servants, who were up at 5am to light the fires and make everything happen. I suppose the rest is history, but I didn’t want to be in it or anything. I don’t like the idea of being in people’s living rooms every week.”

She recalls being in a play called Semi Detached with Laurence Olivier and when it came to the first readthrough, she couldn’t speak, because she was so in awe of him.

“I once asked him for some advice, expecting something sage and wonderful. Instead he said ‘Never try and smuggle anything through customs’.

Mind you,” she added whimsically “I once asked Alec Guinness for advice and his wasn’t much better. ‘Always have two alarm clocks’.”

Helen Brown