AS DAWN Steele enters the Glasgow hotel suite what’s immediately striking (apart from her hair colour, which is almost as dark as that of her Evil Fairy in a 2007 production of Sleeping Beauty) is there is no sulphuric whiff of burning ambition about the actress at all.

You would assume that someone who has achieved back-to-back network drama successes since leaving acting college - such as Monarch of the Glen, Sea of Souls and Wild at Heart, with major theatre roles mixed in - must have a hint of the Amanda Holdens about her?

Steele, now back in Scotland with gangsters and grown-up cuddling soap drama, River City, grins as she suggests success came about without wanting it badly at all. “I was incredibly lucky when I left drama school. I got a lot of interest from agents, and that set me up.”

Was her performance in her final year production (which all the agents attend) that good? “I don’t think so,” she says, laughing. “I was playing an eighty year-old, Mrs Culfeathers in The Steamie, so I don’t know if I were even noticed.”

So what did catch the agents’ eyes? Could it have been the supplied publicity pics of the gorgeous young Scottish girl with the Demi Moore looks? (In 2002 Steele went on to be voted the Most Eligible Woman in Scotland.)

“Okay, I’m sure looks did play a part,” she says, grinning. “And I’m not saying I was gorgeous, but I’m lucky the parts keep coming. However, I’m cast in the same sort of roles. (The sexy love interest). I’m never going to play the geek in the corner, the wallflower, much as I’d like to. Television does seem to put you in compartments.”

Ah, the curse of beauty, but did she ever go up for the beastie roles?

“Never. I know I’d never even get seen for parts like that.” Would she never think to shave her head and slip in a couple of Tam Shepherd’s joke shop teeth, just to give her inner ugly a chance to emerge?

“No,” she laughs, “not unless I was paid a lot of money. My agent once said I should wear my glasses to meetings but that’s about as far as I’d go. And you need to get a meeting (for such roles) first, and that’s down to the agent to get you that in the first place.”

Steele certainly doesn’t seemed steeled to strive for success, to come out of her comfort zone. Is this why she hasn’t taken herself off to Tinseltown, to do the casting agents’ rounds?

“Absolutely,” she admits. “A friend asked me why don’t I go out with Paul (Blair, her actor husband) to Hollywood for the pilot season but you’d need to go for six months or a year and go up for the ten auditions a day. And I don’t know if I’m cut out for that world anyway. She muses, and laughs; “I’ve been thinking about it more lately. Maybe I should try it, once. But then again, maybe I’m too risk averse.”

Maybe she’s had it too easy. When not in the big dramas, theatre has come calling, offering panto stints, national tours. But she’s hardly been chasing touring work either. “The last (touring) play A Perfect Murder was a great play, but when you spend eight weeks crying and being murdered every night it is knackering. And then you are trying to get home to see Coco, driving at ten o’clock at night.” Would a year-long West End run be easier? “Not really,” she maintains. “I want to put Coco to bed.”

Steele hasn’t had to work too hard to find work along the way but even though there’s now less of it around (for every actor in the land) she selects the jobs that can fit around her four year-old. The Blairs live in Whitstable in Kent, a beach town the actress discovered while living in London and the time Steele takes to talk of her coast world is an indicator how happy she is to be there. She even runs the local Book Group.

But Steele has managed to make her stint back in Scotland work out.

“Paul and me agreed that whoever isn’t working looks after Coco. As for leaving her behind? Yeh, the guilt is bad, although, at least my parents (dad an alarm engineer, mum a bank worker live in Milton of Campsie) get to see her and they’re ecstatic.” Steele adds; “Really, I couldn’t say no to the role, I wasn’t working at the time.”

Ah, the role. Steele has gone from dressing lion cubs’ paws in African adventure Wild At Heart to undressing the local gangster she’s trying to tame in BBC Scotland soap River City. And the slo-mo passion scenes with her sexy GP Dr Annie Jandhu and Alex McAllister, (played by Shieldinch heartthrob Jordan Young) have been so raunchy they make the Jessica Lange/Jack Nicholson trashed kitchen table scene in The Postman Always Rings Twice look like a teddy bears picnic.

Does she realise little old ladies in Carnoustie could be choking on their custard creams? “I was a wee bit surprised (when she read the scripts),” she says, grinning. “But it’s great and I’ve got better storylines than I had in Wild At Heart, especially for a woman my age, although I didn’t think it was going to be this hard.”

She laughs, realising her slip into double entendre. “I mean it’s really hard for an actor, the speed of it all, filming four episodes at a time. But it’s also exciting and challenging.”

Has hubby seen her love scenes with the young, handsome Jordan Young? “No, to be honest,” she says, grinning. “But Paul is an actor. He understands. And non-jealous to the point of being annoying.”

Clearly, there has been a little bit of necessity in taking on the soap stint. But has ambition played a part? When speaking of her daughter, there’s a reveal as to why Steele needs to be working. “Coco is a natural performer,” she gushes. “She’ll say ‘Introduce me. I want to sing!’ And I’ll do it, even if we’re on the bus, and she’ll belt out Let’s Go Fly A Kite. I was like that at the same age, singing from Mary Poppins or Grease.”

Ten year-old Dawn Anne Steele was sent along to entertainment legend Dorothy Paul’s Saturday morning drama classes. And she loved it. And when Paul helped land a role in a Charles Rennie Mackintosh drama, the acting dawn had truly arrived. “I got to wear Victorian costume and a hair piece,” Steele recalls in excited voice. “I just loved this dressing up world right from the start. I still do. And when I do go home to Whitstable I feel fulfilled as an actress.”

It’s unclear how long Steele will stay in Shieldinch. She loves the River City role and her character has yet to get her comeuppance. (The first rule of soap is that all miscreants are punished). “But Coco stars school in September, so I have to factor that in.”

Yet, Steele still needs to perform. And it transpires she is a little more ambitious than first imagined. The actress reveals she has asked actor pal/turned writer John Gordon Sinclair ‘Please can I play your lead female role’ should his novels make it onto screen?’ And a similar request lobbed in the direction of Scots crime writer Denise Mina.

“I do have acting ambitions,” she maintains. For example? “I want to play Lady Macbeth. And I would love to do the Steamie, and I’d love to play Dorothy Paul’s part, Magrit.”

We’re back where we started, Dawn. Now, there’s no doubt you could play the role. You were a Silver Medal winner at drama college. You have talent. But to convince producers you can play outside of the sexy love interest box will you walk about for a few weeks without hair dye and make-up and wearing a head scarf and a permanent scowl?

“I don’t know,” she says grinning. Have you ever truly suffered for her art? “Well . . . . I did learn to play guitar for my part in Tutti Frutti,” she says, grinning of her . . . role as Suzi Kettles. “But it made my fingers sore. I haven’t played since.”

*River City, BBC1, Tuesday at 8pm