If you have a bad

day, you just come

in and take it out

on the company

or the audience .

Jackie McGlonestrips the make-up from the many faces of actress Jan

Wilson.

NO REST for the wicked, sighs the evil witch Carabosse, lashing

poisonous green glitter on to her eyelids and painting an evil,

incarnadined smile on her face. Here we are in the witch's den --

actually a pokey wee dressing-room at the King's Theatre, Edinburgh,

with Dralon drapes and wall-to-wall brown polyester shagpile -- and the

lady has just dined. Not on eye of toad or slivers of bat and newt, but

on Cuppasoup and a cheese and chutney sandwich.

Ah, says Jan Wilson wryly, for it is she, the glamour of showbiz!

The Wicked Witch of the East smokes the first of several cigarettes

and puts on the full slap, all the while conducting a conversation with

The Herald and coping with a stream of callers, delivering everything

from her microphone pouch to greetings and news that she has made the

front page of that evening's paper after her visit to the Sick

Children's Hospital. We would, she says philosophically, have had more

privacy for this interview had we done it on Waverley Station, or on the

Edinburgh-Glasgow shuttle, from which she has just disembarked after one

of those truly embarrassing experiences that are always happening to

her.

''Coming home today, the train was absolutely packed to the gunnels

and there was this girl sitting beside me, chat, chat, chatting away,

and there was this boy, who knew the girl, standing a few feet away, and

he was trying to tell her who she was sitting next to . . . I felt my

face kind of blushing. I'm sure it didn't, but I thought, 'oh dear, the

train's packed and everyone's looking'. Anyway, eventually, she asked

me, 'are you Willie's ma?' ''

The shy Jan Wilson, when she is not being ''bad'' in pantomime --

something she has been doing annually since 1984 -- will be forever

remembered in Scotland as Willie Melvin's poor old mammy, Doris, in City

Lights, a series that ended three years ago but which is still much

loved and much missed, thinks Wilson, because it was something the whole

family, mother, father, kids, and grandparents, could sit down and watch

without being assailed by vulgarity. Mrs Melvin was, of course, your

stereotypical ma -- a woman in a pinny with an assembly line of ironing.

(Willie, aka Gerard Kelly, is also in Sleeping Beauty, playing the Dame,

Queen Kylie.)

Today's shuttle experience is something that is forever happening to

her. She has that kind of face and she is dead famous. ''I don't drive,

so I'm always on buses and trains and I'm forever getting these souls

who come up and say 'excuse me . . . ', then they sit down beside you

even though you are trying to do your crossword or study a script and,

well, you can't be rude to people. They are always desperate to know all

about Gerard or Andy Gray. Of course, I don't tell them anything, but by

the end of the journey I know all about their lives and their families

and their problems, and they know less about me than they did when they

sat down.''

It is the power of television, Wilson says, and it never ceases to

amaze her. The things people believe! She remembers being in the TV

soap, Garnock Way, years ago and an actor who played a wife-beater was

actually taken down an alley in Glasgow and beaten up because his

attackers sincerely believed he was htting his ''wife''. Well, the worst

that could have happened to ''Mrs Melvin'', we muse, is someone handing

her a pile of ironing. That's what mammies and neighbours are for.

But then, says Jan Wilson, has she not made something of a career of

being your archetypal Glasgow next-door neighbour? It all started in the

sixties when Jimmy Logan cast her as somebody's neighbour and since then

she has lost count of the number of neighbours she has played. The

sixties, my goodness, hasn't she been around a long time? Twenty-nine

years in the business. Twenty-nine years of neighbours, ladies of

ill-repute, and wicked witches. ''Nothing very glamorous really,'' she

says, ''but then I don't have that kind of face, you know. It's easier

for people to look at me and to believe I am bad.''

''Bad'' she may sometimes be, but she is also a smashing actress, tall

and angular with a wonderfully sweet and mobile face. This last couple

of years alone she has lit up the Scottish stage in everything from The

Guid Sisters at the Tron to starring, hilariously, opposite Andy Gray in

Kenny Ireland's summer season of farces at the Royal Lyceum Theatre in

Edinburgh. She has been lucky, she says modestly, it all started when

she left drama school one Friday and was employed by the late Victor

Carin on the Monday, starting off as an assistant stage manager, and,

for a season, played small roles in anything that came along, from

Agatha Christie to Shakespeare. The following season she worked with

Jimmy Logan in the Sam Cree farce, Wedding Fever, in which she played so

many times she eventually had four different parts, first the

bridesmaid, then the bride, and a couple of more mature parts.

''In 29 years I have had only about two months here and there out of

work. I have been so very, very lucky,'' she says. Perhaps, I suggest,

talent also has had something to with it? Well, she supposes, if you can

do your job well . . . Wilson was also at Harrogate Rep for three years

before joining Bill Bryden's Scottish Theatre Company at the Royal

Lyceum in the seventies. For Bryden, she also appeared (''in a pinny'')

in The Ship in Glasgow during 1990 and next year she'll be in his next

epic, The Picnic, also in Glasgow. ''Yes, she's a neighbour, a wifie,

and I think this one knits.'' In London in the seventies, she also

appeared in The Bevellers, by the late Roddy McMillan, and was in John

Byrne's The Slab Boys at the Royal Court.

On television she has been in everything from Bergerac to Taggart and

Lovejoy, in which she played the English gentry's soor-faced

housekeeper. And this year she has made two films, Charlie and Louise,

for the German company, Luna Films, and The Priest and the Pirate, for

VIP, which is set in Edinburgh and therefore there were lots of

freezing-cold night shoots. ''It's set in places like West Granton and

Pilton, Charlie Kearney and lots of other local 'faces' are in it, but I

can't tell you too much about it, apart from the fact that it's about a

priest who comes from abroad and who falls for a young lady. If I tell

you anymore, I'll get told off,'' Wilson apologises.

She is unfailingly patient and well-mannered with her stream of

visitors and her interviewer. Tell me when you want me to leave, I say.

She will do no such thing, that would be very rude, she says, sounding

quite outraged at the very idea. Spitting venom, being a right bad lot,

putting a curse on Sleeping Beauty, and zapping everything that moves

into a trance six nights and three afternoons (including Sundays) a

week, is a great way to let it all hang out anyway. If you have a bad

day, you just come in and take it out on the company and the audience.

Recently there have been few good days for Jan Wilson. Four weeks ago,

her 79-year-old father died, which meant that she had to pull out of the

first week's rehearsals for Sleeping Beauty -- ''I rehearsed a brand new

panto in six days, so it proves it can be done,'' she says proudly.

''Daddy just fell asleep and didn't wake up. It was such a shock. My

mother died five years ago and he wasn't keen to go out anymore after

that, so I was always worried about him. It was a relief when he died so

suddenly; maybe relief is the wrong word, but I feel he is happier

wherever he may be.'' An only child, Wilson was very close to her

parents and lived with them virtually all of her life.

A Fifer, from Cardenden, she was educated at Cowdenbeath High School.

Her parents ran a fruit and confectionery shop and an ironmonger's in

Cardenden. From school, she went to hairdressing school in Glasgow and

the ironmonger's became Jan's salon. Finally, she went to drama school

in Edinburgh, where she did a teacher's training course. Her parents

sold their shops and bought a hotel in Royal Circus in Edinburgh, where

they always did special rates for thespians ''because Daddy knew how

little actors earn''. When she had her children -- her daughters Joanna

and Sarah are 27 and 23 -- she had her parents to look after them and

was back at work five weeks after Sarah, the younger, was born. ''I

don't suppose you'd be allowed to do that nowadays.''

Married twice, first to actor Maurice Roeves and then to Sutherland's

Law actor Martin Cochrane, she is twice divorced and now has ''a

gentleman friend'', Chris Potter, manager of the King's Theatre in

Edinburgh. ''We are off and on and off and on, but we are very close at

the moment. He has been wonderful, helping me through daddy's passing

away.'' Daughter Sarah, who works in the box-office at the Assembly

Rooms in Edinburgh, is also divorced -- ''following in mother's

footsteps, I keep thinking, although she is so very happy now''.

Her daughters -- Joanna is on the Air UK ground-staff at Edinburgh

Airport -- live next door to her in South Queensferry in a bungalow

built by their late grandfather. ''Although I say it myself, they really

are very nice girls. I sent them to a girls' school in Edinburgh and I

remember the junior headmistress saying to me, 'hopefully in this

school, we teach a little bit of the old and a little bit of the new'

and I thought that's exactly what they are getting at home and I have to

say, they are mine, but they have turned out to be extremely nice,

well-mannered, fun-loving girls. We have our arguments, but they are so

thoughtful, I don't know what I'd have done this past month without them

and Chris helping me through.''

It has also helped, she concedes, having Doctor Theatre on her side.

''To hear people laughing, what a tonic! It's so healthy to have fun. We

laugh a lot in this show, I can tell you. I love laughter, I really do.

There is no sound like it, it's just the best thing in the world.''

* Sleeping Beauty is at the King's Theatre, Edinburgh, until January

29.