SIX months ago, actress Sarah Tansey left Heartbeart after three years to spend more time at home in the South. The irony of her current situation doesn't escape her. She's back in Yorkshire, where the long-running ITV1 series is filmed, to appear on stage.

Her role in a production of Ibsen's A Doll's House at West Yorkshire Playhouse in Leeds is her first work since ending her time as Jenny Latimer in Heartbeat. "I was back in the world of unemployment and spent four or five months painting - if not my house, anyone's house," she says. "The thing that frightened me was that, because I'd done Heartbeat for three years, I'd been out of the loop for three years and wondered if anyone would remember me.

"It was getting to five months and I started panicking, and then the phone started ringing."

She was well aware of the perils of leaving a series to go back to being a jobbing actor as boyfriend Hywel Simons had earlier left ITV1's The Bill, in which he played gay sergeant Craig Gilmore, after a long spell at Sun Hill nick. "I've seen what happened when you leave a series through so many of my friends and my boyfriend. There's never any guarantee you'll get work as an actor. My father is a barrister and is always working, but still worries where the next case is coming from," says Tansey.

After being unemployed for months, she had to choose between A Doll's House and another job offer for the same period. No doubt being "a bit of an Ibsen nut" swayed her in favour of the Leeds production. Her last work before joining Heartbeat was in another Ibsen drama, Ghosts.

"I don't pretend to be an expert on his plays. Of the ones I know, A Doll's House is one of my favourites," she says.

"People sometimes get the wrong idea about Ibsen, that's it's all turgid and grim but I think it's a real page-turner. It's still an extraordinary story that's capable of shocking people.

"It was written in 1879 but isn't dated, although the translation updates certain ways of speaking. It's a bit of a thriller too. The last half hour is so riveting, the time just shoots past."

Tanya Moodie, who played Medea at the Playhouse two years ago, heads the cast as Nora, a woman struggling to find herself in a suffocating marriage.

Tansey plays her friend Mrs Linde and would like it to be known that the person who appears on stage is nothing like her. "I have to look old, ill and it's not in any way glamorous. It's the opposite," she says. "I wear this great bustle, which can make you look enormous. I look like an animated hedgehog."

She didn't think she suited the Sixties clothes she wore as pharmacist Jenny in Heartbeat, where she hadn't intended to stay so long. "I went for three months and suddenly it was three years," she says.

Prior to that, she'd done seven or eight years of theatre. She missed the stage while making Heartbeat but felt it was time to do some telly. Heartbeat was virtually a year-round job, with only a month's holiday.

Her entry into acting was "just one of those things", she says. "I was quite a shy thing at school, went into a school play and loved the idea of being someone else. I had a bit of a stammer at the time and that disappeared when I was on stage."

She did an English and history degree at university before going to drama school. Being a late entrant was a good thing, she thinks. "I enjoyed my three years in drama school better. I had dealt with a lot of my baggage going to university first."

The lovely thing about being back in the theatre is the rehearsals, a luxury that an ongoing series like Heartbeat can't afford because the turnaround of episodes is so fast.

"When you're on set every day you learn quite fast. You have to ask questions. When I left, I felt secure and confident," she says.

"I was sad to leave, some of the cast became like family. The make-up room was like a green room where we put the world to right, smoked too many cigarettes and ate too many chocolates."

* A Doll's House: West Yorkshire Playhouse, Leeds, from Friday to March 19. Tickets 0113-213 7700.