She may have come to it late in life, but Kate Brown's acting career is flourishing, as Steve Pratt reports.

SIX years ago, Kate Brown made a life-changing decision. After a nomadic life, living in cities around the world, the family had settled down in this country and her two daughters were growing up.

She decided to pursue her dream of acting. "I'd always wanted to be an actress and, like most parents, mine dissuaded me. So I went to university and did a Bachelor of Music degree. Then I taught for many years," she says.

"When we moved here and my children reached a certain age, I thought it was time to break out of the box. Everything lined up and pointed in the right direction.

"You say to yourself, 'It's now or never. I'm going to die a bitter old lady if I don't give my dream a shot'. I trained with the Actors Company for a year. That was six years ago. I'm still here and loving every moment of it."

Family ties restricted her for a while. "I've been acutely aware of my responsibility as a mum and not wanted to work away from home for long periods. It becomes easier as the children get older," says Brown, who grew up in Cape Town.

York is actually the furthest afield she's ventured theatrically. She's appearing at the Theatre Royal in Noel Coward's comedy of bad manners Hay Fever. She and David Leonard - best known as the venue's long-serving pantomime villain - play the heads of the Bliss family, hosting a the weekend party from hell at their country house near Maidenhead.

Judith Bliss is an actress who has moved to the country and is, as she puts it, "stagnating". She lives her life like scenes out of a play in which she's the central character.

"Everything spirals around her and she drives everything to spiral around her. It's always about her feelings. In that way, she's demanding and needy. She's energetic, imaginative and exciting but demands a lot of other people," explains the actress.

"She has amazing mood swings. And as a family of artistic people, they're easily distracted."

Brown hasn't drawn on any one actress for inspiration, seeing Judith's quality as an ability to attract and repel all in one go. This is something she has come across in people in real life.

Director Damian Cruden has cast a younger Judith than usual. "I think most people who've played her have been considerably older than I am. So that's a bit of a challenge - I'm not 50 to 60," she says.

She's a great fan of Coward's work, having previously played in Fallen Angels and as the ghostly Elvira in Blithe Spirit. She's also played Dame Celia Molestrangler who, followers of radio's Round The Horne will recall, was very much in the mould of a Coward leading lady as she acted opposite ageing juvenile Binky Huckerback.

Brown appeared as real life actress Betty Marsden, who played Dame Celia in the show, in the hit play Round The Horne...Revisited on the London stage.

"In a way it's been enormously helpful for Judith because with Betty Marsden there were all these vocal characters, all of whom were so different. There's something of that in Judith - when she meets someone she's playing a different role."

One of the most challenging aspects of playing Marsden was that so many people had grown up listening to Round The Horne. Brown was not one of them. She'd never heard of the show before the audition came up.

"Because I grew up in Cape Town, it wasn't something I was aware of or had heard my parents talking about. When I got the audition I ran out and bought the tapes and listened to them," she says.

"I did become a fan. Because we did the show for 15 months, we met a lot of the family and friends of the original cast. That was very special as we had no film of them doing the show, relying on anecdotes and people telling us things about them.

"The most important thing was the vocal aspect because so many people had listened to the show, which held deep memories for them. You could have got away with not physically resembling her but vocally it had to be right."

Hay Fever involves a little bit of singing and piano-playing, although Brown's instrument is the cello. "It's very helpful because the overlap between musical training and theatre training is much closer than one would imagine. I use elements of each discipline to help the other," she says.

* Hay Fever is at York Theatre Royal from Monday to June 11. Tickets (01904) 623568