SHE has been a member of Britain’s most reprehensible family and has worked in a shop that is well known to millions of TV soap fans.

But after playing Nellie Dingle in Emmerdale, and having a stint as Norris’s unspeaking assistant in Coronation Street, Maggie Tagney (pictured) is currently wowing Keswick audiences.

She is producing a brilliant performance as Amanda, the faded Southern belle, in the Theatre by the Lake Studio production of the Tennessee Williams’ classic The Glass Menagerie.

Lots of television roles have come Maggie’s way in her acting career and her connections with the Keswick theatre date back to 2000 when she appeared in the big millennium community production.

Bristol born Maggie was involved with amateur productions, but her school did not do drama and she admits: “It never occurred to me that ordinary people became actors.”

However, living in Bristol, she took every opportunity to grab free seats which were offered to her school for performances at the Bristol Old Vic.

She recalls: ”I saw every show they did. As soon as the word got out that seats might be available I was in there.”

Initially her plan was to become a drama teacher and she studied dance and drama at Dartington College of Arts where she worked with a professional actor who told her she should become an actor herself.

Teaching turned out to be a disaster. Maggie did her teacher training in Nottingham and admitted: “I found out I was very bad at it. I used to burst into tears. The classes simply would not do what I said. Clearly it was not going to work.”

She had been volunteering with a small theatre company at weekends and during the holidays and they offered the 23 year old Maggie a job, although after a couple of years the funding ran out.

She applied for a couple of jobs and was taken on by Avon Touring in Bristol which gave her an Equity card. They toured small scale venues and she says: “I loved the work. But then I thought I had better get an agent and try to get a foot in repertory and TV. Now, in my 50’s. I am back to small scale touring again and enjoying it.”

Maggie played an American tourist in the millennium Keswick event and she was back for the 10th birthday Theatre by the Lake production of Melvyn Bragg’s Maid of Buttermere, playing Kitty, the old woman from the fells who was the maid’s confidant.

“It was lovely working with a community chorus. They were smashing,” she says.

Back in Keswick for this summer season, Maggie has had parts in What The Butler Saw and Northanger Abbey as well as The Glass Menagerie.

All of the roles are very different from being a Dingle. Maggie took over the role of Nellie Dingle when the actor who had played her, Sandra Gough, had to pull out. “She had arthritis and the Dingles’ hovel definitely wasn’t good for it,” said Maggie with a chuckle.

With the actor who played Butch Dingle wanting to leave the programme and with Lisa and Zak being far too happily married for a soap plot, the programme makers decided to bring back Nellie from Ireland.

“They wanted her to cause trouble between Zak and Lisa. It was a cracking three months,” she said. “The village is filmed on the Harewood estate just outside Leeds and the interiors for Emmerdale are done in the studios in Leeds.”

More recently Maggie made her bow in the nation’s most famous and long lasting soap, Coronation Street.

“Rita was on her holidays and Norris wanted someone to work in the shop. The first person would not stop talking so he sacked her and took on my character who didn’t talk at all which also drove him mad.”

Maggie, whose first TV part was in The Practice, playing the mother of a teenager, says that more interesting parts have come her way then in her 30s and 40s. “You have to hang on in there and the work comes again, but I think it is harder for women,” she said.

During her seven month stint in Keswick Maggie has taken the opportunity to do plenty of walking. “You could not find anywhere better to be than Keswick, although by the end of the season will be looking forward to going home.”

She has one major role still to fulfil before the lakeside season ends in early November and that is as part of a three strong team from the Theatre by the Lake who are going to do the Great North Run. Maggie is raising money for kidney research.
 

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