Ever Ready

Being a Gemini, Richard Cawley says he's always ready for a challenge. This need constantly to do something new is only too evident from looking at his list of past and present work.

The Doncaster-born lad who wanted to become a ballet dancer has been a fashion designer, making clothes for Princess Diana, and celebrity TV chef on Ready Steady Cook. He writes and also moonlights as a pantomime dame, this year at York Grand Opera House. Now he's learning British sign language so he can work with deaf design students. On top of that he'll be seen next year in Sky One reality show The Only Gays In The Village.

Now when he describes himself as "shy and retiring", he's having fun at his own expense. It wasn't always like that. As a child growing up in Yorkshire, he was keen on art and design but what he really wanted to be was a ballet dancer. His father was having none of it, vowing that no son of his would appear on stage in make-up and tights.

As this wasn't Billy Elliot, young Richard's hope of a ballet career were crushed. "I had an idyllic childhood until I was 11 and went to a school that was absolutely terrible. There was no Catholic grammar school in Doncaster so I was sent to one in Sheffield," he recalls.

"To escape from it, I went to an amateur dramatics company in Doncaster. My big sister was going out with someone in this company who was a scene painter. She organised that I go to help him. On the first evening I got in the wrong room. I was too small and frightened to say anything. I ended up being picked to be the second page in As You Like It. So, three months after my father said no son of his was going to be wearing make-up and tights, I was a singing papier mache tree. I absolutely adored it and since then have done lots of different things."

Art college in Doncaster was followed by fashion school in Paris, where he also studied life drawing at art school. Later, emerging from London's Royal College of Art with a masters degree with distinction, he joined the fashion house of Belville Sassoon, whose clients included Princess Diana.

Then the Gemini factor came into play. "I'd studied for seven years and worked as a fashion designer for 13 years, I was ready for a new challenge," he says.

The opportunity came with the Mouton Cadet cookery competition in The Observer newspaper. Cawley entered and won, swapping posh frocks for the kitchen. "It was just a matter of being in the right place at the right time," he says modestly.

He wrote cook books and became a TV chef as one of the regulars on BBC2's popular afternoon series Ready Steady Cook. After a time, he began looking for something new. "It's a fabulous programme and I'd done it for seven years. It was beginning to be just a job. There was no buzz any more, although that's not to say I don't want to do TV again. I got to the stage where I was working too hard and not having enough time to do all the things I still want to do."

So it was ready, steady, gone although, with a catering business and two cafes, he hasn't deserted the food industry for good.

He started learning British sign language. While he's studying, he works one day a week as a volunteer in a school for the deaf. Once he's passed his exams, he hopes to work part-time in an art college assisting deaf students.

His fashion sense is coming in handy as he plays one of the Ugly Sisters, Buttercup, in Cinderella in York. This is his eighth pantomime and fifth Ugly Sister. "I've done Dame twice and once got to wear men's clothes as Dandini," he says. "It's very hard work playing Ugly Sisters. We have nine costume changes and my make-up takes me about 45 minutes to put on.

"I make my own costumes. You can completely go to town. Cinderella is kind of 18th century so all my costumes are based on that period but made in mad fabrics. One is in black-and-white chef's check with two plastic lobsters. Another is a traditional style but made punk with giant safety pins."

Making clothes for panto is different to working in a fashion house. He recalls a duchess who said she wanted a relative's wedding dress copied for her own daughter's marriage. "We imagined she was going to turn up with a photograph of Aunt Bessie's dress. But the chauffeur came in carrying this massive Gainsborough painting in a gold frame of one of her ancestors. I had to sit there and sketch the dress the woman in the painting was wearing," he recalls.

Cawley sees pantomime as a way to get back on stage. He would love to do plays. He's even written one which a producer is interested in staging.

He's also returning to TV in Sky One's The Only Gays In The Village, in which four gay television personalities leave their big city lives for a sleepy rural village and a month of country living.

"I absolutely loved it. It was the best fun and really was reality," he says. "I'd said I wouldn't do reality TV. I certainly wouldn't do the jungle one. But when they told me what this one was about, it sounded great."

* Cinderella runs at York Grand Opera House until January 2. Tickets 0870 606 3595.