As a schoolgirl in Wilsden, Kate Ambler's favourite novel was Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre.

Come next month Kate will be spending three weeks playing Cathy Earnshaw, one of the leads in Emily Bronte's Wuthering Heights, a book she first read in Bolton working as an assistant stage manager for Barrie Rutter's Northern Broadsides.

"I should have been watching the show and cueing the lights," she said.

In fact she's playing three parts, of necessity because the cast - which also includes Marshall Lancaster, who played DC Chris Skelton in BBC TV series Life on Mars - is only five-strong.

"It was written by Jane Thornton for Hull Truck Theatre Company with their style in mind, where actors take more than one part.

"It's going to be hard work - we are going to be shattered at the end - but it will be fab too. The oldest is 32, so the energy level will be high," Kate added.

She learned her craft at The Poor School in London, working as a receptionist by day and taking acting classes at night. She did that for two years, becoming a professional in 2005.

Following her spell as an assistant stage manager with Northern Broadsides she was lucky enough to land a part in a Broadsides touring production, The Man with Two Gaffers, which played York's Theatre Royal: very handy when it came to preparing for Wuthering Heights.

"I knew the theatre, I knew the space. When you're working, acting is the best job in the world."

And when you're not?

"I don't know what is beyond this play, we'll have to wait and see. I have an agent, Malcolm; he is brilliant and puts me up for a lot of stuff. I don't know what route my path is going to take," she said.

Kate said she wasn't specialising in tragedy or comedy; she was doing what work she could to build up a reputation for reliability. "It's like any kind of freelance work - an electrician or a plumber - once people know you can do the job and are reliable you get work."

That's a level-headed, Yorkshire outlook; but then she did spend the first 18 years of her life in Wilsden before studying English literature at Norwich University; and she did have a granny up in Haworth to talk sense into her when she got carried away.

It was while in East Anglia that young Kate Ambler realised the power that landscape has on emotions. The flat landscape and cinemascopic skies made her yearn for the moors and rolling clouds of West Yorkshire, a landscape with which generations of Bronte fans always associate the solitary, brooding Emily.

"It's unbelievable that that amount of passion and wildness came out of someone who barely left Haworth," she said.

In fact Emily was quite well travelled, being born in Thornton and familiar with the countryside all around Haworth. She travelled to London and for a while was resident in Brussels with sister Charlotte.

But beyond the circumstance of location, all three Bronte girls and their brother Branwell were brought up to be literate, well-read and skilled in the arts of pen and brush. What they did not know they invented, dramatising their own worlds of adventure and risk: Charlotte and Branwell invented Angria and Emily and Anne created Gondal.

"It's so full of emotions that we all recognise. We have all felt jealousy, unrequited love and had the big love affair that's gone nowhere. Very human but very extreme," Kate said.

Well, that was the sort of young woman Emily was. During her last illness she refused to let the doctor attend her at the parsonage, determining that she was dying and that her death was nobody's business but her own.

Wuthering Heights is on at York's Royal Theatre from June 2-23, starting at 7.30pm. The box office number is (01904) 623568.