TARA Fitzgerald was trapped last week. The blizzard was so bad that buses and trains were cancelled, and the entire cast of Bryony Lavery's new version of Ibsen's A Doll's House were stuck in the theatre's restaurant for hours before they could get home. The way she tells it, during a break in what sounds like an exhaustingly intense dress rehearsal, it becomes a wonderfully romantic, windswept and poetic image, somewhere between Dunkirk spirit and Chekhov's Moscow.

In fact, Fitzgerald is in Birmingham, where the big freeze has only temporarily affected the Rep's production. Today, the first act is running late, and she's taking a welcome breather from her big scene as Nora, the perfect little wifelet whose getting of wisdom may be cruel but fuels, inside her, a fierce independence that transforms her forever.

''It's super-real,'' she says of what is effectively a chamber piece played, pretty much, in real time. ''The journey Nora makes might take a normal person an entire decade, but here it's so seismic that I have to learn how to be in the moment.''

She pauses. ''I know that sounds wanky,'' she checks herself, ''but Bryony has used a new dictionary here that's more mathematical and baroque, and feels very vivid and alive, rather than a fusty old melodrama, as the play's sometimes done. It's like Pinter or Beckett. If it isn't done exactly as its written, then it simply won't work.''

Fitzgerald herself is no slouch in the eloquence stakes. Her sentences, delivered in rich, honey-treacle tones, come perfectly formed and full of little syntactical flourishes

to colour in each point. Considering the almighty hissy fit she's just

had to throw on stage, by rights

she should be all over the place.

As it is, she's calm, and charm,

personified.

Given her pedigree, however, there are few actresses more suited to playing Nora than Fitzgerald. It's less than a year, after all, since her own dream marriage, to actor

Johnny Sharian, collapsed after two years together. She witnessed marital strife first hand, too, after her parents split up when she was four, then again when her mother's second marriage fell apart only three years later. Add this to the effect her father's death had on her when she was only 11, and the fact that it was another eight years before she discovered it had been by his own hand - the same year she suffered an ectopic pregnancy - and a penchant for high drama is perfectly understandable.

''We can all become like this in our relationships,'' she says of Nora, skirting deftly around any personalisation of her current role by bringing everything back to the play itself. ''I defy anyone to say this doesn't relate to their own life in some way. If you've lived your life you're bound to have this store of experience that makes you independent. But A Doll's House has so many layers. It's so dense, and there's so much damn stuff there. Boy, oh boy,'' she adds, offloading some of her post-rehearsal baggage for the first time.

''Boy, oh boy'' is an exhalation that's always been close to Fitzgerald's work. There was a time TV watchers could set their watch by her. Coming to prominence just as the BBC was going through one of its periodic dalliances with lavishly-costumed classical romps, she appeared in both The Camomile Lawn and Anglo-Saxon Attitudes on Sunday nights. Mere seconds after the watershed, corsets were being undone and frocks unbuttoned as ratings soared. Elegantly gamine and porcelain posh as she

is, Fitzgerald was tailor made for such outings.

By that time, Fitzgerald had already made her big-screen debut in Hear My Song, in which she

had been cast even before leaving drama school.

By that time she'd already waitressed her way around the world, a stop-gap restlessness perhaps born from a peripatetic childhood that saw her whisked from the Bahamas to Clapham, attending primary schools in Glasgow, Dublin and Stratford somewhere in between. Even then she knew she wanted to be an actress, though in school plays found herself more often than not cast as a stock narrator. It was, she huskily suggests, something to do with the voice.

''You're fearless when you're young,'' she says now of her adventures. ''At drama school I didn't think I was maybe as interesting or as bright as the other people there, but having travelled a bit seemed to hold me in good stead.''

Her first professional stage role was playing opposite Peter O'Toole in the West End, where her steely grace probably came in very handy. The films Sirens and Brassed Off followed, while altogether dourer TV roles, in The Tenant Of Wildfell Hall and The Woman In White, seemed to define her attraction to dangerously troubled women.

On stage, she's played the title role in Antigone, Ophelia to Ralph Fiennes's Hamlet on Broadway, where she picked up the New York Critics Circle's best supporting actress award, and poor messed-up Blanche in A Streetcar Named Desire. Now, with Nora, Fitzgerald is en route to completing the set of similarly glacial, intelligent and often troubled women of substance and fire.

Beyond A Doll's House, other than the usual possible projects actresses can't talk about yet, Fitzgerald's plans are vague, though Hedda Gabler, The Lady From The Sea and more contemporary works by the equally pukka Stoppard and Frayn trip off her tongue as ideals for the future. She's also trying to buy somewhere in London at the moment, having tired of renting and in need of a room to call her own.

Without ever being explicit, such a workaday domestic endeavour is nevertheless just one more parallel between Fitzgerald and Nora. Onstage at least, it's a need to push herself to the edge, to flirt with her dangerous side - yet to remain her own woman come what may.

''I can learn something,'' is how she sees it. ''The idea of becoming apathetic or cosy is something I'm very afraid of. You have to keep pushing yourself not to fall into all the traps or to succumb to a dreadful middle-age spread of the mind. It's about exercising that muscle, and making sure it stays alive.''

Whatever the weather, Tara Fitzgerald won't stay snowed in

for long.

A Doll's House, King's Theatre, Edinburgh, February 17-21.