THE Scottish actor John Cairney remembers encountering an unusual barrier between him and the Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama: an old fellow holding up a strikingly hostile placard.

Cairney says he and others were “threatened by being denied admittance” by the man, who was wearing a bowler hat and wing collar. The placard read: “Do Not Enter Here: Theatre is a Place for the Devil! Avoid Temptation!”.

Says Cairney: “As soon as I heard that I couldn’t wait to get in! I mean, that’s what I was after”. He would spend three exceptionally happy years at the Academy, which today is known as the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland.

Many years later, in the spring of 1982, a young man from Aberfeldy travelled to Glasgow for the first time in his life, to audition at the RSAMD. His mother was with him, for moral support.

He had discovered that he had a talent for acting, having taken part in a stage play at high school. When the Academy wrote to him a week after his audition, saying that he had been accepted, it was a key point in his life. “...It wasn’t just a letter of acceptance, it was an escape, a new life, a miracle”, he recalls.

The young man’s name? Alan Cumming.

“I was very young when I came to drama school, I was just 17, and my time here was very formative”, says David Tennant, whose RSAMD Junior Academy matriculation photograph, in 1982, is seen here.

“It was three years of very intensive growing up, experiencing life, and I was getting to do what I always wanted to do ... those years were hugely informing of who I became and I wouldn’t have stood a chance in the professional world without it”.

Cairney, Cumming and Tennant are three of the many luminaries who have contributed to a book about the institution’s first 175 years.

Entitled Royal Conservatoire of Scotland: Raising the Curtain, and written by Stuart Harris-Logan, the RCS’s Keeper of Archives and Collections, it is a detailed history of a distinguished academy that first saw life, in 1847, as the Glasgow Athenaeum.

As its president, Sir Cameron Mackintosh, notes in the foreword, the RCS “has been a powerhouse of the arts, both in Scotland and internationally”.

And what a list of graduates the old place has: Alan Cumming, David Tennant, James McAvoy, Richard Madden, Jack Lowden, Cora Bissett, Tommy Smith, Billy Boyd, Dougie Vipond, mezzo sopranos Karen Cargill and Catriona Morison, screenwriter Krysty Wilson-Cairns, among thousands of actors, singers, dancers, musicians and film-makers who have studied here.

Krysty Wilson-Cairns, who co-scripted the First World War epic, 1917, has said: “RCS didn’t just prepare me for my career, studying there opened my eyes and showed me what my career could be. It gave me my career”.

In the book, Johnny McKnight, the actor and “vanguard of post-modernist panto” auditioned three times before being accepted by the Academy.

“Before I started studying”, he recalls, “I could only ever imagine performing, because it was the only job I could visibly see; studying at the Academy opened my eyes to the full range of what I could engage in”.

Jackie Kay, who until last year was Scotland’s Makar, attended the Juniors’ drama course between the ages of 12 and 16: “I can honestly say, no word of a lie, that it changed my life. It gave me confidence in my imagination, taught me not to have fear when speaking in public, and how to project my voice...”

Actor Richard Madden acknowledges: “I wouldn’t be here without [the Academy], and the opportunities it gave me. It was a safe place to start studying my craft and learning how to be an actor.

“It took me a long time to be able to call myself an actor, and it gave me the confidence to do that, by making me feel like I always was one”.

His subsequent journey, which has ranged from the TV dramas, Bodyguard and Game of Thrones, to such films as Marvel’s superhero film, Eternals, “started here, and I’ll be forever thankful and grateful and proud that I studied there”.

Karen Cargill, who has sung on the world’s most renowned stages, from the Royal Opera House to New York’s Met, studied at the Academy’s Opera School.

By her own admission, however, she was distinctly nervous on her first day: “It was terrifying. I remember standing in the corridor outside the Fyfe Lecture Theatre and thinking, ‘oh no, no, no, no, no. This is not for me. I’m not good enough for this’. I called my parents and said, ‘I need to come home. This is a mistake’.

“I’d just been given my timetable and hadn’t even had a class. Once I started singing and getting into the actual performing, that made a huge difference, because that’s what we were all there to do”.

Actor James McAvoy still has a soft spot for his time at the Academy.

“My training at the RCS benefited me hugely”, he says. “At RCS, you get three years of doing tons and tons of jobs – by the time you’ve left, you’ve worked on 20 different jobs in the first couple of years and you have performed so many times. You just don’t get that in the industry”.

McAvoy is a keen supporter of the Junior Conservatoire of Drama, which has done a sterling job in reaching out to people from disadvantaged backgrounds.

Tony Osoba, whose TV roles included appearances in Porridge, Coronation Street, The Bill and Hollyoaks, attended the RSAMD from 1966 to 1969. “Whenever I was working in the industry and looked back at my time in the college, it always struck me that I couldn’t think of anywhere in the world that could offer a better and more thorough grounding in the profession”. His contemporaries there included David Hayman, Alex Heggie, Denis Lawson, Peter Blake and Jake D’Arcy.

Scottish Ballet star Jamie Reid began the BA Modern Ballet course in 2012. “Pre-2009 for a young Scottish dancer”, he says, “it was guaranteed that you’d had to move to London or elsewhere if you wanted to go forward and have a professional career. Having the ballet in my home city [Glasgow], whilst still being able to get the same high standard of training as elsewhere, was the best of both worlds for me”.

Writing in the book, RCS principal, Professor Jeffrey Sharkey, says the Conservatoire is proud to be a ‘national’ institution with international ambitions. “The combination of being rooted in our own soil and open to the world”, he adds, “has made us an increasingly attractive destination for international students”.

Currently, students from more than 60 countries are studying at RCS. And from these and from the home-grown students, the next James McAvoy and Karen Cargill will assuredly appear.

Royal Conservatoire of Scotland; Raising the Curtain, is published by Luath Press at £40 (paperback £20). A limited-edition copy is also available, for £175.