Happily haunted by an old friend

says snuggling into her fun fur for our photographer. It does seem

rather ridiculous to be even wearing a fake fur at all, she says, rather

apologetically, but it is extremely warm and she does feel the cold very

badly and, anyway, it reminds her of her two cats, Bill and Pete, at

home in London, both of whom she is missing terribly.

She gives her coat an affectionate stroke and says, yes, she does

still do her bit for the International Fund for Animal Welfare,

something she has been involved in for a couple of decades, campaigning

in her own quiet way against seal culling and the senseless slaughter of

kangaroos for handbags in Australia. ''I wouldn't say I'm an enormous

activist, but I do send contributions, write letters, and send postcards

about various very cruel things that happen to animals all over the

world.''

When she chooses an egg and cress sandwich from the pile in front of

us, I ask if she is vegetarian. ''Funnily enough, the idea of being

vegetarian has never really taken root, partly because in a way I don't

dare let myself think about it. I have many good friends who are and

they are very hale and healthy and happy on it, so maybe it's something

I'll come to.

''I so enjoy the ritual of a family Sunday lunch -- not so much the

roast beef, more lamb and chicken. But it is actually that thing of

making the connection, which is part of the way we live our lives in

order to survive what is a painful world. I dare not really think too

much about that lamb skipping about and I suspect there are very many

people like me.''

In Edinburgh to star opposite her partner David Rintoul (aka Dr

Finlay) at the Royal Lyceum Theatre as Mrs Manningham in Patrick

Hamilton's wonderfully creepy play, Gaslight, Heilbron is between

rehearsals, hence the sandwiches and the mineral water. Now

fortysomething, it seems only yesterday that she inscribed herself

indelibly on the heart of the nation as Chris Guthrie, heroine of Lewis

Grassic Gibbon's Scots Quair trilogy. It is in fact more than 23 years

since Sunset Song, the first book, was filmed for BBC2, yet Heilbron

remains as slender as a reed, with sleek red hair and clear blue eyes.

She looks barely a day older than the Chris Guthrie of Cloud Howe and

Grey Granite, the final parts of the trilogy, which were filmed more

than a decade ago.

Has she ever managed to escape from Chris Guthrie, a character who for

many Scots voices their modern history, their hopes, and their failures?

No, and she has no desire so to do. ''I have great affection for her,

enormous admiration for the books, and very happy memories indeed of the

work on it, both with Moira Armstrong, who directed Sunset Song, and Tom

Cottar, director of Cloud Howe and Grey Granite. There were so many very

good Scots actors in it. In the main, they were a good deal older and

more experienced than I was and I shall never ever forget their kindness

to me. It is very hard when you are basically THE show, but nobody knows

who the blazes you are. It was also vitally important for us to get the

sound right -- and I'm from the west -- so they all helped me on the

timbre and the vocal patterns. It is a particular kind of poetry, the

north-east accent, and people like Victor Carin, now sadly dead, and

Derek Anders, were tremendously patient with me, going over and over the

sound.

''I can honestly say I have never, ever wanted to get away from Chris

because she had quite an effect on my life and it was the sort of part

you get totally immersed in, and also the character of Lewis Grassic

Gibbon himself. I spent a lot of time with somebody I admired

tremendously, not only as a writer, but also as a human being. He was a

very fine man indeed. But yes, it was an absolute privilege to play

her.''

Chris Guthrie is an extraordinary creation: a female protagonist in a

novel written in 1932, who is herself independent, thoughtful, complex

and at the same time a mouthpiece for Grassic Gibbon's own mysticism and

political views, and his passionate divided feelings on the peasant

landscape from which he himself came. Heilbron -- her unusual surname

comes from a paternal Dutch great-grandfather -- found Chris Guthrie

''uniquely endowed with wisdom''. She can't, though, have been an easy

role to play, even for an actress as intelligent as Heilbron.

But then she has never shirked the challenge of a difficult role in a

career which has taken her from doing children's radio for the BBC in

Glasgow when she was 12 -- she wrote from her Kelvinside home and

offered her services -- to touring five-actor productions of King Lear

across the United States. Now here she is back home in Scotland, at the

Lyceum, where she last appeared as a wonderfully febrile Blanche Dubois

in A Streetcar Named Desire in the mid-1980s. This time round, it's

another one who ''is clearly off her rocker''. She quickly corrects

herself: ''No, let us say that, like Blanche, she is emotionally

unstable.''

Gaslight, the play, was made into a famous and marvellously

atmospheric black and white film starring Ingrid Bergman, which is often

shown on television. But, we decide, we can't talk too much about the

mad Mrs Manningham without giving away the plot to those few unfortunate

souls who have missed the movie. ''It's a very intense piece, there is a

hot-house element to it and it's full of tension. And Patrick Hamilton

is a real stylist, he writes in a very particular way, full of

repetition and inversion. Mrs Manningham is a very vulnerable woman as

she has had that awful tragedy in her life of her mother dying insane

when she was quite young and she fears that the same thing may happen to

her -- you know all that Victorian stuff about the madwoman in the

attic.''

There are quite a few nutters on Heilbron's CV, though. ''I seem to

either get this funny combination of very cool, collected, rather

powerful cold women'' -- like the woman she played in a recent Taggart,

or the barrister for the defence in the recent date-rape saga in

Brookside, or the rich bitch in a beautiful frock in the upcoming new

series of The House of Eliott -- or women going quietly, or sometimes

noisily, round the twist -- like Mrs M.

''Maybe it's two different sides of me,'' she muses. ''Neither of

which I think I am particularly like. But it may be be just something to

do with the way I look, or the bone structure or something. I have no

idea. It is just the way other people see you. I don't think I am ever

perceived as Ms or Mrs Normal. I do not get to play the housewife with

2.4 children, perhaps that's because I am not a mother with children and

I simply don't have that aura. I don't know what it is.''

Anyway, Mrs M is a cracking part. The play is the tale of a woman in a

Victorian marriage before the Married Women's Property Act came in. ''It

is so shocking to think that, even in the happiest of Victorian

marriages, the husband had complete control of the wife in every detail,

children, if there were any, finances, and property of all kinds. I

think what is frightening is how recently all that has changed. Our

grandmothers and their mothers would remember people whose lives were

affected by this. It must all be in our psyche as women, in the vast

memory pool that we all have -- and that I'm sure Jung would talk about,

about dreams that are archetypal -- and that has been influenced so much

by what happened to women in marriages and relationships, because it is

only relatively recently in the great scheme of things that anything has

changed at all.''

Although Heilbron and Rintoul have shared their lives for 18 years --

they first met at the Lyceum in Bill Bryden's production of blessed

memory of The Miser with Rikki Fulton -- they have never married. It is

a marriage, though, she says, adding that during their 18 years they

have seen many an official marriage between friends come and go, yet

they remain happily together. She was married at 19 to the actor

Jonathan Cecil, son of Lord David Cecil, whom she later divorced. ''I

was far too young,'' she says. ''I wouldn't recommend it to anybody. I

look back at myself and I think . . . well, one changes so much. There

is such a lot of life still to happen to you at that age.'' She met

Cecil at LAMDA, where she went to train as an actor at 17. ''I was young

for my age and I spent a lot of time pretending to be grown-up without

being grown-up at all and not fooling many people, least of all

myself.''

Today her greatest regret is that she did not go to university before

drama school -- ''I'd have done lots of plays there, scraped a degree

together of some sort, and matured a good deal in the process.'' Born in

Glasgow, the eldest of three daughters (her sister Lorna is also an

actress and youngest sister Lesley works for a London auction house),

she was educated at Westbourne School for Girls. ''I was an absolute

idiot not to go to university, but I was a bit blinkered at 17.'' The

Heilbron girls had a happy, middle-class childhood. Their late father,

David, like his father before him and grandfather before him, was in the

wine and whisky business.

It is less than a year since her 76-year-old father died. ''It was

very unexpected and I miss him very, very much. My mother died in 1980

and my father was an only child, so I now have no relatives left in

Scotland, which feels rather strange. But my father was a great chap and

anyone who knew him would tell you what a splendid man he was. He was a

funny man, with a very dry humour. He didn't suffer fools gladly, but

was also extremely kind and sensitive to people. He had a way of knowing

with people when they needed support. I have nothing but happy memories

of him, memories like our last marvellous day out together at

Musselburgh Races and Loch Fyne Oyster Bar just four days before his

heart attack. I miss him terribly.

''I took him a heather in hospital, which he really liked, and I have

taken it down to London and it'll be in full bloom on March 13, which is

the day he died. So I shall always have that.''

* Gaslight is at the Royal Lyceum Theatre, Edinburgh, from January

14-February 5.