John Alderton was three years into happy retirement when the chance came to join the cast of Calendar Girls, back in his beloved Yorkshire.

Then the veteren comedy actor discovered he'd been cast as the husband who dies and inspires the charity strip idea. He talks to Steve Pratt about the role which rekindled his career.

WHEN an actor says to you, "This is exclusive, I haven't told anyone this", you begin to wonder what secrets he's about to reveal. It transpires that John Alderton - star of TV hits Upstairs Downstairs, My Wife Next Door and Please Sir - merely wishes to confess to a case of mistaken identity.

In Calendar Girls, he plays John, whose death persuades his widow and her WI colleagues to bare all for a charity calendar to raise money for leukaemia research.

His screen time is short, but his performance gives the film its emotional core. Yet, it turns out, that Alderton thought he was going to play the husband of another calendar girl, played by Helen Mirren.

That's the role about which he went to see director Nigel Cole. Six weeks later they offered him the film, and he didn't pay much attention to the actual casting.

"Then three weeks before we began shooting, the make-up girl asked if I was wearing a skull cap or shaving my head," he says.

"I asked why, because I was playing Helen's husband. She said because I was playing John. I thought she must be mistaken and said to check it out. She rang back to say, 'you're playing John'." The fact that Alderton is in the film at all is surprising, as he retired three years ago. "I said to my agent, 'no more'," he recalls.

"Forty years of solid work was plenty really. If you work for British Rail you get a clock for that long. I wanted to improve my golf, see the world and smell the flowers. What you miss is the challenge of doing a part like John."

His actress wife Pauline Collins is still busy working, and persuaded him to see Cole about Calendar Girls.

It emerged that as a student Cole had seen Alderton on stage in The Birthday Party and that was the night he decided to go into show business. The actor almost felt obliged to do the film after hearing the story.

Once he knew he was playing John, he set about researching the part. He felt the pressure in playing a real person of being true to the man behind the story. He travelled to Yorkshire to meet his widow Angela Baker and her family.

"I knew if I got it right for them, it would be okay. It was quite difficult for Angela because it was only two years since he died. It was very tough for her," he says.

"We hit it off. We walked on the Moors together and she talked me through John's life. She showed me videos of him when he was well that she hadn't watched since his death.

"I think it was a cathartic thing for her to talk to a Yorkshire guy who's the same age as her John. The children made me a list of things about him, and I went to where he worked. So I had not just her view, but that of his children and mates too."

"I was very privileged to know a lot about him. I knew if I could satisfy the family, I would get somewhere near it."

Alderton says he'd have done the same for anyone, to find the people who knew the person to help bring him alive on screen. "It was a job of love to do it. I know Angela and I will keep in touch for the rest of our lives because we have a kind of bond."

Filming brought Hull-born Alderton back to Yorkshire, where he filmed It Shouldn't Happen To A Vet in the 1970s, in which he played vet James Herriot. "It's nice to be back in Yorkshire, it's home for me," he says. Calendar Girls has revived his interest in work. He's taken two roles since then in BBC projects - as a vicar in an Anthony Trollope adaptation and as another man dying of cancer in Down To Earth.

"Whatever comes along, I'll look at it," he says.