Julie Graham heads home for BBC drama Shetland

Graham smiles, treating me to a perfect close-up of her pearly whites. "I decided to get it filled," she says. "In my 20s it was cute, in my 30s it was sexy but in my 40s I was starting to look like a toothless hag. There came a point where I saw myself on the big screen and the gap was just glaring at me, I could practically fit my tongue through it.

"Ever since I've had it fixed people have written me letters saying: 'Why did you do that? It was your trademark', but they will just have to get over it. The good thing is that it's not completely fixed so if I ever do Dickens I can take it out and still get my toothless hag look on if I need to."

Rather than cosmetic dental procedures, however, we're here to talk about Graham's forthcoming role in BBC Scotland drama Shetland, which returns to our screens for a second series on Tuesday. The Glasgow actor plays straight-talking procurator fiscal Rhona Kelly alongside Douglas Henshall in the lead role as brooding detective Jimmy Perez.

The six-part series, based on the novels of crime writer Ann Cleeves, follows on from its successful debut last year, which attracted 12 million viewers. While that was adapted from Cleeves's book Red Bones, the new series will now draw on her other titles Raven Black, Dead Water and Blue Lightning. Made by ITV Studios for the BBC, the show was filmed on location in Shetland and other Scottish sites last summer. Graham, 48, is among a host of guest stars including Brian Cox, Alex Norton, David Hayman and Bill Paterson.

Best known for her role opposite Martin Clunes in hit ITV rom-com William And Mary, as well as playing manipulative gold-digger Megan in At Home With The Braithwaites and more recently Jean in murder mystery drama The Bletchley Circle, Graham jumped at the chance to work in her native Scotland and be reunited with Henshall, who she first worked with on the 1990 film The Big Man alongside Billy Connolly and Liam Neeson.

"Dougie is brilliant," she says. "He's a wonderful actor and sets the bar for the atmosphere and style of the show." Graham was equally enamoured with the Shetland landscapes, which she experienced for the first time during filming.

"Shetland was gorgeous," she enthuses. "We were up there late summer. I've been to some of the other Scottish islands but never to Shetland before. It was bleak but very beautiful and I loved the people. I had a bit of down time so I was able to tour around. I went to the little island of Mousa and one of the reasons I loved it was I missed the ferry across. Only in Scotland could you call the ferryman and he would come back to get you. He was a bit grumpy at first but I won him round. We ended up getting pally and I took him for a drink to say thanks."

She may have fallen in love with the wilds of Shetland, but these days home for Graham is at the opposite end of the country in the seaside town of Brighton where she lives with her daughters Edie May, 10, and seven-year-old Cyd. "My youngest is a tomboy and the older one, even though she is a girly girl, is still quite feisty," she says. "Luckily, although they are so different, they get on well. They are used to me being away [for work] so they are quite resilient and independent."

Both are adjectives which could be equally applied to Graham, whose parents separated when she was a young child. She faced a watershed moment in her late teens when her mother Betty died, aged 50, from lung cancer. She credits it as being pivotal in spurring her on to follow her dreams and not waste a single minute. "Losing a parent when you are young has a profound effect on you," she says. "It gives you a kind of fearlessness because the worst thing that could ever happen to you has already happened. It makes you brave and appreciate things. You are not cosseted. There is no-one to go home to: you have to look after yourself.

"I suppose I have tried to instil that sense of independent spirit in my children as well. Hopefully I will be around for a long time, but I think it is important to allow them to be themselves and cut the apron strings."

In that sense, she is keen to see her daughters' childhoods emulate the freedom of her own upbringing. "I was brought up in Glasgow until I was 10 or 11 then we moved to Irvine, which was by the sea and so I had much more of an outdoors existence," she recalls. "We'd go off on our bikes around the countryside and down to the beach.

"Even growing up in Glasgow, when we lived on the south side in the tenements, we were just thrown out to play and told to come back when it was dark or teatime."

Having attended a Monday night drama class in Glasgow from the age of 13, Graham learned the ropes at Borderline, the Ayrshire touring company where her mother, also an actor, had worked for many years. Her earliest roles included a part in Taggart; she then went on to build an extensive CV which includes Bonekickers, Survivors, The Bill and comedy drama series Being Eileen alongside Sue Johnston.

After a stint in London, Graham has lived in Brighton for the past 15 years. "I like being by the sea and I love Brighton because it is very open, with a tolerant and eclectic mix of people," she says. "I love bringing my children up there because they get to see things they might not [elsewhere]. There is a guy who goes into our local supermarket who, from the waist up, looks like a trucker and from the waist down looks like a prostitute. He wears high heels, ripped stockings and short skirts, while on the top he wears cardigans and has a beard. My children don't even bat an eye."

Her face clouds over when her husband, fellow actor Joseph Bennett, who she married in 2002, is mentioned. "I don't really want to talk about him to be honest," she says. Is that because they are no longer together? "Yeah," she replies. Her steely look indicates the topic is firmly off-limits.

Graham is soon back on steadier ground talking about her love of hitting the open road on adventures with her daughters. "Our camper van is called Tallulah and she's pink," she grins. "That means I can't get away with anything like accidently crashing into anyone or taking their wing mirror off. Although she is lovely, [Tallulah] is a bit trampy, so I still sometimes feel a bit ashamed next to the pristine ones with their nice curtains. Ours is a bit of a rust bucket.

"I've had the camper van for about 12 years now and been all round Europe in it. We go on big trips in the summer. We went to France last year and this year to Cornwall and Dorset. If the weather is nice 10 minutes outside Brighton we'll find a place to wild camp at the weekend, so it's almost like living in the country.

"I think camping definitely makes them less precious," she says of her children. "We'll park up somewhere and the rule is they have to b***er off for at least 45 minutes while we set up. Usually they will only come back when they are hungry. They will go into the woods and build dens: it's very Swallows And Amazons."

She is not the only actor to have a crush on camper vans. Graham recalls how she and Clunes, who have remained good friends since their William And Mary days, would spend hours in their trailers between takes, poring over catalogues of the latest models. "It was like camper porn," she says, descending into throaty laughter. "We were so sad."

Graham rolls her eyes in mock horror when asked what she thinks of Clunes's other roles since the show wrapped after three series in 2005. "Well, they've been terrible," she deadpans, a twinkle in her eye. The pair did enjoy a brief on-screen reunion when Graham had a guest star role on Clunes's ITV series Doc Martin.

"We always wanted to work together after William And Mary but could never find the right thing," she says. "Then he was doing Doc Martin. Eventually [he] just rang me up and said: 'We're trying to cast this part but we can't. Why don't you just come down and do it?' They had always resisted having me in it because of the William And Mary connection. Of course, I could never refuse him anything so I went down, we had these scenes together and I just hated him being so grumpy."

Graham says she'd love to see them reprise their roles as love-struck undertaker William Shawcross and midwife Mary Gilcrest. "I have this fantasy that Martin and I will get back together and do William And Mary when we're pensioners and all the kids have grown up," she says.

The characters she plays don't tend to suffer fools gladly and in that respect Graham would appear to mirror her on-screen alter egos. Having worked in a law office and on the door of a Soho strip club before her big acting break came along, she is, by her own admission, a fly by the seat of her pants kind of gal. "I've never had a plan," she asserts. "I've always been grateful that I've worked but I've never been someone with milestones all mapped out." Is that the camper van-driving hippie in her? "I'm definitely a hippie a heart. I was born in the wrong era."

The actor professes to live by the simple philosophy that "if you say you are going to do something, do it with good grace". Her expression grows animated, warming to her theme. "Even if you get into a job and realise it's not what you thought it was going to be - shut the f*** up, do it with good grace and don't be a twat," she says. "An ex-boyfriend once said: 'There is always a c*** on a job - just make sure it isn't you.'"

While "resting" between jobs is a phrase every thespian dreads, Graham refuses to compromise on her beliefs even if it means missing out on work, and she recently turned down a voiceover for a tabloid publication. "I can't bear the newspaper or anything to do with its principles and the page three nonsense," she says. "As a feminist I can't promote a newspaper I clearly don't agree with the policy or ethos of. So you have tiny little things, standards to a certain extent, but in terms of playing someone who was a [tabloid] journalist? Of course I'd play her - and I'd make her a bitch."

Graham is vocal in backing the No More Page 3, a campaign started by novelist Lucy-Anne Holmes in 2012, which has called for David Dinsmore, the Glaswegian editor of the Sun newspaper, to stop showing naked women in its pages. She was also irked by a BBC drama trailer last year which sparked an online backlash for its lack of women.

"Being a woman and a feminist is a no brainer as far as I'm concerned," says Graham. "I don't understand women who say: 'I'm not a feminist.' They have allowed that word to be twisted into something it's not. I have daughters and I want them to grow up in a world where they are not defined by their gender and do have equal pay and opportunities [to men]. I'm outspoken on that and always have been. I don't want my daughters to grow up feeling they are the fairer sex or have to compromise in any way just because they are female." n

Shetland starts on BBC One, Tuesday, 9pm.