It was not the most dramatic of entrances.

In fact, Letitia Dean's TV debut was so unmemorable, even she's forgotten it.

It wasn't in Albert Square but 200 miles up the M6, in Liverpool's Brookside Close, that the 15-year-old Miss Dean took her first tentative steps to soap stardom.

She played someone called Dawn, from dahn sarf. She was fresh out of stage school and it was a useful couple of weeks' work.

She has no recollection of what Dawn said or did, and neither has anyone working on Brookside today. Never mind. Her next role would make more of a splash.

Sharon Mitchell, nee Watts, was the archetypal soap princess; a woman whose marriage was as rocky as a Bradford car park and whose family tree had more branches than Woolworths.

Abandoned at birth and brought up by a violent stepdad who fathered her best friend's baby, she married a convict with whose brother she carried on behind his back. Life on EastEnders was nothing if not varied.

It was hardly surprising that after 11 years, Letitia felt her character had done all there was to do. She slammed a taxi door in Grant Mitchell's face and rode out of Walford, never to return.

"Well - I wouldn't say never," says Letitia, cautiously. "I mean, you never know what's around the corner, do you?"

All the same, it's four years since she filmed her last scene, so she's stopped expecting a call from the BBC.

Besides, she's busy. She's touring the country with Michael Elphick in a revival of Loot, Joe Orton's blackest of comedies. They'll be in Bradford on Tuesday week.

And in the summer, she'll start work on a new TV comedy drama - though her superstitious nature prevents her from talking much about it, since she's yet to sign the contract.

"Yeah - life is going OK for me, you know," she says. "I'm quite happy at the way it's ticking along."

Loot, she admits, was a challenge. It's only her second play and her second time on tour. Ironically, her first was with another Sixties piece, Rattle of a Simple Man.

Her role this time is as a homicidal, gold-digging Irish nurse. With a background like that, Sharon Mitchell starts to seem like Maria Von Trapp.

Audiences expecting to see another EastEnders characterisation will be surprised, however. Joe Orton, the enfant terrible of Sixties theatre, was nothing if not outrageous.

"Audiences aren't to be underestimated, though," says Letitia. "They adapt. They don't expect to see you in the same role all the time."

If the provincial theatre is unfamiliar territory, comic acting is not. After the melodrama of EastEnders, it was to comedy that she turned increasingly, first as a foil for the comedians Trev and Simon, then to her own series, a piece of nostalgia set in a telephone exchange and called The Hello Girls. Most recently, she had a running part as a dim weather girl in the sitcom, Drop The Dead Donkey.

"The Hello Girls was great fun," she says. "And it was a bonus that we got to do a second series.

"When the first one ended we didn't think we'd ever do it again. But BBC1 got a new controller and he put us back on.

"It was a nice family show - the sort of thing everyone could sit down and watch. And as I tour the country now, I'm surprised at the number of people who tell me they're disappointed it's not coming back.

"But that's the business, that's the way it goes. What can you do?"

At just short of 31, Letitia is already preparing to celebrate her 20th anniversary in showbusiness. She was a young Miss Scarborough (though her family's from London) and as a juvenile she took part in a West End production of the musical, Annie.

Later, at stage school, she did an old-time music hall act and sang songs from the Fifties and Sixties in a cabaret band.

Her brother Stephen also smelled the greasepaint and followed her on to the stage. She and he are currently zig-zagging the country as he tours with the musical based on the Happy Days TV show.

"I hear it's wonderful, but I haven't seen him in it," she says. "When he's in one town, I'm in another."

She has, however, seen Stephen in other roles at Bradford's Alhambra. "And I've been to several pantos there, to see my friend Billy Pearce."

Letitia and her brother are particularly close - they shared a West End house when she was in EastEnders - but she has managed to cloak her other relationships with a privacy rare among soap stars.

She retreats when she can to her family's home in Lincolnshire - a veritable oasis as two more months on the road stretch out before her.

Her schedule was interrupted three weeks ago by the sudden onset, not for the first time, of a mystery illness. She spent several days in hospital, during which an understudy went on in her place, before doctors identified the virus.

"It was gastroenteritis - pretty nasty. I'm still a bit weak but the pain's gone, thank God. It really takes it out of you."

Four years ago, as she filmed her final scenes for EastEnders, she was similarly stricken, having to be whisked off the set by ambulance.

"At times like that, a bit of rest helps more than anything," she says.

Rest, however, is the last item on her agenda as she applies the make-up for another matinee. "Hopefully, Loot will do well in Bradford," she says. "But it's always pot luck with a play, isn't it?

"One week you're sold out and the next week you're playing to a limited audience.

"All a bit weary, but it's work - and enjoyable work at that. You can't really ask for more."

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