Former Emmerdale actress Helen Weir is returning to her roots to appear at Harrogate Theatre in Ibsen's Ghosts. She talks to Steve Pratt about motherhood and making the most of her career.

IT'S fitting that Helen Weir's debut on stage at Harrogate Theatre is in a play that centres around a mother and son relationship. For her own son, Tom, is the reason she's been living in Yorkshire, renting a place away from her London base while he's been attending school in the area.

"He's been doing his A-levels and is now going on to the next stage of his life," she says. "But I was brought up around here and went to school in Ilkley. I was born in Oxford but my mother died when we were very small and my father brought us to live with his mother in Yorkshire."

Weir returned to the county to appear in ITV's soap Emmerdale, as Pat who married Jack Sugden. She and actor Clive Hornby, who still plays the farmer, also became a couple off-screen and had son Tom.

His birth led to her exit from the series. She was killed off in a road accident. "I went over the hill in a car - and people still keep saying, 'Are you coming back?'. I suppose I could come back as a ghost," she says.

The soap history books have it that her departure resulted from a plan to feature their real baby as the Sugden's on-screen baby. The problem was the name. Weir and Hornby named their son Thomas which, as the name of Pat's first nasty husband, the scriptwriters couldn't use for the fictional baby.

Weir, so the story goes, refused to let the Sugden tot be called anything but Thomas as she felt a different name would only confuse her child. The producers wouldn't go along with it and she refused to sign her contract. She remembers it differently. "I left really because it was time that I left. When it came down to it, I didn't really want to be a working mum with a baby in a pram in the corner of the studio," she says. "When you have children it takes over. That's the most important thing in your life."

She didn't work for three years, then went off to do the odd bit of TV and theatre. When Tom was 15, she went to Stratford to join the Royal Shakespeare Company. "That's when I really started acting again. But I was there at home all the time he was at school," she says.

She did miss acting. "I think you always do but I had other things to do, and it was only those first few years that I didn't do anything at all."

Her latest stage role brings her to Harrogate Theatre as Mrs Alving in Ibsen's Ghosts, a play that met with a storm of criticism when it was first premiered over a century ago. It tells of a family with a secret - Mr Alving was seen by the community as a model father and husband, but was actually an incorrigible drunken philanderer. His widow sees her attempts to protect her son threatened.

Weir read the play at school but can't remember seeing it produced. "It runs the gamut from incest to repression to self-awareness. It's fascinating, like watching a study in psychoanalysis. Freud got a lot from Ibsen and the way he worked," she says.

"Mrs Alving is a repressed lady living in the 1890s in a very closed society, who's been brought up with a set of rules and regulations about how to live and told what her duty was. She has to hide things about the past and about her married life that she wouldn't want anyone to know about. Then she has the worry of her son and the sins of the fathers visiting on the children."

She's been renting a home in Bolton Abbey while her son has been at school in Yorkshire. "It's such a lovely community. It's a bit like going back in time," she says.

Not that rehearsals for Ghosts leave much space for other things. The day we spoke she was rehearsing until ten at night. "Then I drive back over the moors to bed and, when I get back, I have all that work to do on the lines," she says.

Neither of her sons - she has an older son as well as Tom - has shown any inclination to follow her into acting. Her eldest son was in publishing but now works in horticulture, while her youngest is studying countryside management. "So it's green wellies time," she says.

Ghosts is at Harrogate Theatre from Friday to November 6. Tickets (01423) 502116.

Published: 11/10/2004