WHEN Nigel Harman tells the true story of the tale most of the press ran back in his early Eastenders days it reveals so much of the actor.

Harman, currently starring in David Mamet classic Glengarry Glen Ross in Glasgow this week, was reported as being a Sainsbury delivery driver on the day he landed the soap role – playing Dirty Den’s son, Dennis - that launched his TV career and won him a series of awards.

That much was true. But the story suggested a long-struggling dancer-actor who had continually failed to find work.

It wrote Surrey-born Harman up as a Cinderella character, forever consigned to the drudgery of endless, fruitless, disappointing auditions.

It made great headlines of course. Except the real story was a rather different. “It was a great bit of PR,” he recalls, grinning of the events of 2003. “But I wasn’t plucked from obscurity. I had actually been working as an actor 15 years.”

He adds, smiling; “What had happened was when I got to 27 I realised I had a career mapped out for me as a dancer, or a small part player in West End musical theatre. But it wasn’t enough so I formulated a plan whereby If a director offered me a musical I’d say ‘Okay, I’ll be in your musical theatre show, but only if you let me be in the Chekhov/Shakespeare play you’re also directing soon'.”

He tried that strategy for a while but it still didn’t take him to the career level he sought. So Harman decided on a really dramatic strategy. He stopped doing musical theatre and plays completely. “I now wanted to carve out a career in television so to concentrate my efforts I took the job as a delivery driver. I still had a mortgage to pay.”

The story is revealing; he had the ambition and the self-assuredness to step away from performance in order to get back in at another level. “I had this idea I’d give it ‘till I was 30,” he says of the plan. “If TV hadn’t happened I’d go back to the West End. But I knew there was a risk involved.”

The risk paid off big time. Harman, aged 29, landed the role of Dennis Rickman in Eastenders, and in 2003 the National Television Awards gave him the first of many awards to come.

Yet, in 2005, he found himself stabbed and dying in a pool of blood. Was leaving the soap about playing different characters? “I was quite happy to leave and go experience other things,” he says in convincing voice. “I love a challenge. For me it's about playing characters who have this duality about them.”

He smiles; “I did a play guy once when I played a nice guy. I did it to see what it was like and although I was in almost every scene I was really bored.”

Harman is the very opposite of bored right now. In Glengarry Glen Ross (touring the UK for the first time) he’s playing the role of head salesman Ricky Roma in this tale of desperate salesmen commanded to sell southern real estate which is virtually worthless.

Roma, played by Al Pacino in the 1992 film, has been described as “a shark in a sharkskin suit,” a man who would sell his granny’s inhaler for the price of a fish supper. “It’s an amazing part in a great play,” he says, smiling. “Roma has the gift of the gab so he rarely stops speaking, a man who can charm the birds out of the trees. He has a great brain, a fascinating philosophy, but he’s also ruthless. He’ll do what he has to when faced with a tricky situation.”

He adds; “I think all the characters are likeable, and despicable in the same sentence. What makes the play work for me is it’s selling the message there is good and bad in all of us.”

Which part of his own soul does Harman does reach into in order to find the Ricky Roma badness? “That’s the thing,” he says, grinning, “even the Dalai Lama has darkness in him, he just chooses to follow the good.”

There was inevitability about Nigel Harman becoming an actor, growing up in a small village in Surrey. His father, a retired bank manager, and his mother were committed am-drammers and young Nigel warmed to the spotlight. "Me and my mum made a pact: that I'd go for six auditions and if I didn't get anywhere, we'd knock it on the head. On the sixth one, I got the Oxo ad."

He was eight at the time. But had Katie Oxo and co not come along would he have gone on to drama college? “Acting has always been a bit of fun,” he offers. “And this whole notion of what is success and fame is so transient. I’m not fussed by all of that.” He wonders; “I’d probably have gone on to university. But because acting has been so prevalent in my life and I always seemed to be working.”

He may not be fussed about fame, but when he talks at great length about the acting process however you can feel his commitment. “When you go out on stage you’re putting yourself in danger. You’re out there to be judged. You just have to stay as calm as you possibly can and hopefully the audience will come with on the story.” He reflects; “That’s what I’m working on as actor.”

Interestingly, Harman may have starred in several television series such as Downton and Hotel Babylon and picked up an Olivier Award for his role as Lord Farquaad in Shrek but doesn’t convey the sense of having arrived at all. He says, for example, he’s rubbish at auditions. “I have to do better,” he admits, smiling. “The natural thing to be is nervous, because that makes us human. But they (producers) don’t want you to be that. It’s a paradox. Some actors however are very good at auditions." He offers a wicked grin; "They can project confidence, give the illusion they know what they’re doing. But I guess that’s a form of acting in itself.”

Is this a little bit like Glengarry Glen Ross (which also stars Mark Benton) in that they are selling something with no real substance? “It’s exactly like that,” he says.

Harman believes success should be about constantly learning, layering on experience. Being connected to “normal.” It’s perhaps not a total coincidence he landed the Cockney role in Eastenders having just come off the back of a Sainsbury’s van. “I like to have a connection to the world around me. I find that a lot of actors don’t hang out with people who have a normal life. As a result, their characters are often approximations based on other actors.”

He laughs; “Hanging around the West End listening other actors talk about their agents is not real life.”

Harman, now 45, is refreshing. He calls it as it is. It’s refreshing to learn when he arrived on the set of Eastenders he was a bit snooty about soap stars - until he realised what some were capable. We chat about panto, which he was also a bit snooty about (having been brought up in an era when the likes of Frank Bruno were playing Genie of the Ring) but now he realises that in the right hands, panto is an art form.

There’s a neat humility about the actor, who also directs. It’s revealed for example, when he talks about the rejection that comes with acting. “Some days it’s more difficult than others. It feels like you’re going through a revolving door.”

It’s refreshing to hear he’s still working hard on his character. “I love to achieve levels of naturalism, a freedom. On stage it means I will deliver the lines, although I don’t always know how I will deliver them.”

Is that not a director’s nightmare? He laughs; “I know what you mean. No, I don’t suddenly go that far off piste that I forget I’m supposed to be from Chicago. And I don’t just do it to keep myself amused. I just love the liveness of it all. In telly you don’t get that at all, although I still enjoy that side of acting too.”

So his Roma accent is sharp and polished? “I can’t be the judge of that. But Chicago is tricky. But I do know you have to keep your eye on it or it can become Chicago via Croydon.”

Harman says part of the success in playing another character is down to understanding, and accepting, his own. “I also need to have a connection to me. The more an actor is at home with themselves the more they can put that aside and concentrate on their character.”

His crits suggest Nigel Harman is fairly happy in his own skin these days. And there's little doubt he's loving the chance to play around with Ricky Roma. “There’s a great speech at the end of the play in which he tells his boss what he thinks of him. It’s the chance to say all the things you wish you had the balls to say. I love that.”

Glengarry Glen Ross, The Theatre Royal, Glasgow, until Saturday.