Willie Ross plays the father of Sue in the late Andrea Dunbar's play Rita, Sue and Bob Too, at the West Yorkshire Playhouse. Jim Greenhalf reports.

Willie Ross is a drunk in the play of Rita, Sue and Bob Too. He was a drunk too in the film version of the late Andrea Dunbar's walk on the wild side of Northern working-class life.

When the movie was being shot a local TV interviewer gingerly inquired whether his interpretation was based on personal experience.

"It's not experience, it comes from observing people. A drunk cannot step outside himself and look back," said the man who also played the drunken father of the luckless Geordie in the hit TV series Our Friends From the North.

In other words for the drunk there is no past or future, only the inebriated present in which regret and hope are blotted out. Only a damn good character actor could bring this off convincingly on film and on the stage. And that's what Willie Ross is, an actor who can turn his hand to many parts (in The Merchant of Venice he played Shylock's servant, Launcelot Gobbo, as a Geordie).

The part calls for a good deal of clever slapstick comedy. Fortunately Mr Ross was able to call upon 30 years' experience as the other half of a stand-up double act called Lambert and Ross which toured the club circuit and ended up at the London Palladium.

"I know sod all about Shakespeare, but it worked a treat. Can a Shakespearean actor stand on a stage for 40 minutes and tell gags?" he said. The late Laurence Olivier anticipated that accusation many years ago by playing the cracked-up comic Archie Rice in both the play and movie version of John Osborne's The Entertainer.

It was while filming Rita, Sue and Bob Too that Willie Ross split up with Peter Lambert (now a publican), got himself a London agent and branched out into TV and movies. He and his wife also moved from Darlington to Wellingborough, Northamptonshire - 50 minutes from Kings Cross by train.

The language in the play of Rita, Sue and Bob Too is much saltier than the dialogue in the movie, although at the time of its release in 1986 Andrea Dunbar's script caused ructions among certain people on Bradford's Buttershaw Estate. Not that they'd seen the film, mind, but they had heard about its language and sexual goings-on, and that was enough for them.

During filming Willie Ross had long chats with young Andrea - the estate's Beacon pub was the focal point for the cast and crew. Far from being loud-mouthed or foul-mouthed, as one might have expected from the film, she was reserved, severe, and defensive.

"She was just lovely. She wasn't aware of how good she was and I don't think she was until her death (she was 29 when she died shortly before Christmas 1990), and I don't think the people of Bradford or Buttershaw were aware of how clever this young lady was.

"The story she wrote was so basic, but Buttershaw is a basic place and the people there have got to look at the truth which is what that girl wrote.

"She was very severe. I think she was wrapped up at that time in the way people were reacting to the play. She was very defensive on things. But she was ever so sweet, and it was difficult to talk to her," he said.

In death, however, Andrea Dunbar has no difficulty at all in speaking to us through her work, thanks, in part, to actors like Willie Ross.

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