IF A movie were to be made of Sheridan Nicol’s life story the opening scenes would reveal the woman she was set to become. A five-year-old is riding her pink trike down Main Street in Larkhall, near where she lives in the flat above the shop in which her father makes cabinets and coffins. There’s a tambourine and an accordion attached to the trike and the little redhead is “singing like a linty”. In the back of her three-wheeler is a handful of betting slips.

“I used to pick up the men’s lines from the local pub and take them to the bookies for them,” Nicol recalls some 55 years later. “And I came to I realise that if I sang while doing this the miners would chuck three pence into the boot of my trike.”

Little Sheridan couldn’t actually play the accordion. The young opportunist was cashing in on the local enthusiasm for band music (we’re not talking jazz or Dixieland). “I learned my performances could pay for my holidays,” she grins.

Performance has paid for lots of holidays since. Right now, Nicol runs Jazzartuk, a dance school now moved into new studio premises in Motherwell where she hatches out hundreds of little dancers, making sure their tap and their tango are perfect before pushing them out of the nest and on to cruise liners, Broadway, the SECC or the West End stage.

In her own career Nicol has been a show dancer, top choreographer on television and stage, a pantomime director and a comedy feed. If that weren’t enough she is also a voice-over artist who hopes to feature in the Disney follow-up to Brave.

Surprisingly, when we chat in a Glasgow hotel, she is about as loud as a flute band drum with the skin removed. Yet along the way she has had to make herself heard among some forceful showbiz characters. “I can be loud, and tough,” she says, “and I push the kids hard to learn.”

Nicol danced from the age of two, taught by her mother Betty Clark, a former British Tap Champion who ran a dance school (Nicol’s grandmother, who played at the silent movies, was the pianist). Nicol didn’t stop performing over the years, going on to study with Scottish Ballet.

However, as a teenager she wasn’t blinded by the bright lights of ambition. If there was an inevitability about going on to work with the likes of Mike Yarwood, Stanley Baxter and American stage legend Bob Fosse she wasn’t aware of it.

“When I was 16 I was ready to go to university to study maths and computing,” she remembers. “But I got offered a dancing job in Perth Rep and I took it. Then I landed work in London and the showbiz jobs kept on coming. I’ve never been unemployed in 44 years.”

After dancing with Yarwood in Blackpool, the teenager took off to America in 1976, having been spotted by Fosse and whisked off to appear on Broadway in the musical Pippin.

For the first time, the gallusness gave out. “When I walked on to the Imperial Theatre stage for the first time I burst into tears. The enormity of it got to me. Then at the half I was physically sick at the side of the stage.”

Nicol was later “huckled out of America” when her work permit ran out and took off to Spain, dancing and singing in a floor show. And sometimes getting stuck, such as when the vehicle she was travelling in became trapped in quicksand in the south of Spain and she had to clamber out. “That was a hairy one,” she says with some understatement. “We crawled out of the windows and watched the truck sink.”

While in Spain she worked seven nights a week, and once resorted to amphetamines to keep going. “Someone gave me speed [which was legal at the time in the country] but I read the instructions wrong. Instead of taking one a day for three days I took three on the first day.” She laughs. “I’ve never had such a clean house – my laundry was perfect. But it took me two days to come down, and then I slept for 12 hours on the beach and got serious sunburn. And me with red hair as well. Then I got fined at work because I had white strap marks.” She offers a knowing smile. “It was an adventurous week.”

The adventures continued. Nicol joined a contemporary dance company in Canada for a tour. “During rehearsal the director said to us: ‘Right, now get your clothes off.’ The ladies didn’t disrobe, the director did a runner and the dancers found themselves in jail in Kingston, Ontario, after the company credit card bounced while trying to fill the bus up with fuel on the way to the airport to escape.

“It was a real comedy moment but the police were great and let us stay in the cells until we got sorted out.”

When work was quiet, Nicol would head back to her mother’s dance school and take classes. Gradually, she became a choreographer, yet without any real eye to the future, working with her own troupe of dancers, whom she would take to Butlins summer seasons and on to television shows.

Nicol staged Baxter’s last panto in Edinburgh and taught him to do his faux Swan Lake ballet routine. “You find that people with great comedy timing can bring this to dance steps.”

How did she cope with the grumbler that was Rikki Fulton? “I sensed when he was upset and factored this in. I knew he was trying to get the best result. And I didn’t get involved in this…” She mimics zipping her mouth shut.

It was on Baxter’s recommendationt that Nicol become a panto director. The next year saw her work with the late Gerard Kelly in Aladdin in Edinburgh, at the time he was attacked at home and stabbed in the face with a bottle.

“Kelly was back at work almost the next day,” she recalls. “He was amazing to work with.”

There have been countless bashings of her own body. “I’ve fallen off scenery and cracked ribs,” she says matter-of-factly. In 1979 during a summer season at His Majesty’s Aberdeen with Andy Stewart, she fell off a bridge over a waterfall and was soaked and bruised.

“I’ve had bras burst countless times,” she laughs of stints on TV in the 1970s, like Barbara Windsor in Carry on Camping. “But no it wasn’t a deliberate wardrobe malfunction.”

The lack of support didn’t do anyone any real harm, unlike the night she performed a step kick on stage and her shoe flew upwards, connecting with an audience member in the box overlooking the stage. The man was hit on the head and knocked out. “He got free tickets for life,” she says of the compensation.

Nicol knows how to work with people. She managed to get on with the difficult Fulton. She dealt with choreographing Brendan O’Carroll in panto at the Pavilion in Glasgow at the turn of the century.

“When you get Brendan you get the whole family package, which could be quite difficult. If you tried to give a family member instruction you had to go through Brendan first. But he’s a very funny man. Yet, I don’t think panto was his favourite time.”

But does she have any real career regrets? “Yes, that I was put into sharing rooms in digs with so many guys because people assumed I was a man,” she says, laughing.

Nicol’s life has produced its difficult, tragic moments. Two long-term relationships came and went. Along the way she suffered two miscarriages.

“If I had had a child my life could have been so different,” she offers. Did she put career first? “Probably,” she replies, “but not always. And I sometimes ponder more the decisions I made when I didn’t put my career first.”

Major loss, she says, puts career in perspective. Her parents died within months of each other in 1999. “You could have heard me scream in Glasgow,” she says.

But she’s a survivor. A grafter. Her dance school features 15 full-time and 200 part-time students. Are children harder to teach these days? “So many think showbiz is all about an X Factor life. I tell them it’s about hard work, and they should learn as many skills as possible, play an instrument.”

A tambourine? Or a play an accordion on the back of trike?

“Why not?” she says, laughing.