ACTOR Julie Legrand is generally game for a challenge. She once played five different characters in a performance of Remembrance of Things Past and had to learn to do a one-handed cartwheel while holding a glass of champagne in the other for another show.

Her part in the coming Beauty and the Beast production at the Royal Shakespeare Theatre, Stratford, is fairly straightforward by comparison. She has just four roles - Beauty's mother, a horse (which is also the ghost of Beauty's mother), a witch and story narrator.

The effervescent actor, who has been treading the boards since the early 1980s and appeared in a number of films and TV dramas, says if she is asked to try something a bit different in a show she usually leaps at the chance of "having a go".

"Remembrance of Things Past was a bit hectic but I'm the sort of person who'll have a go. Beauty and the Beast is quite a physical show and you have to be game for all that. It is a nice challenge for Christmas and I am absolutely loving it," she said.

The show, which has been rewritten, redesigned and re-imagined by director Laurence Boswell, contains dancing and music. It has nine dancers, nine actors and eight musicians.

And Julie makes sure she is up to the job by keeping fit. "I think you have to be pretty fit doing nine shows a week. I am doing dancing and a lot of running around doing the horse.

"I go to the gym and I do a lot of walking. Every morning we start rehearsals with a yoga workout, dance warm-up and vocal warm-up. You have got to be able to sustain your performance."

Julie, who will be recognised by many for playing the psycho nurse in the TV series Footballers' Wives and her parts in Night and Day, Bad Girls, Kavanagh QC, Inspector Morse and North Square, is relishing the prospect of returning to Stratford. Her previous Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC) credits include Temptation, Cymbeline, The Revenger's Tragedy, The Human Voice and Oedipus.

"As a child I used to go to Stratford in a school party. The RSC and the National are the pinnacle of British theatre and to go from being part of the audience to performing gives me great pride.

"I am proud to be a member of the RSC. The company is a very important part of our culture and I am proud to be part of that."

"I love to do TV and film but there is an unpredictability about theatre that requires you to be in the moment. It is exciting and it changes every night. This is the weird magic of theatre."

She describes it as "flying by the seat of your pants" and Julie has certainly gained plenty of experience of dealing with the unpredictable on stage.

During one performance in Paris when she played Elizabeth I her dress caught fire during a scene which included a firework display. She didn't notice the blaze until she left the stage when a member of the crew threw himself on her to douse the flames.

In another production, playing alongside Glenda Jackson, she caught a bug which had been going around the cast and passed out on stage.

"One of the cast got sick and threw up on stage so we had to step around it. The next night one of the others threw up in the wings and I also caught the bug. My temperature plummeted and I passed out without warning."

But Julie hopes the only thing that will keep the Stratford audiences entertained this Christmas will be a spellbinding rendition of this popular children's fairytale but she admits that they haven't yet worked out how she will play the horse.

Beauty and the Beast is the story of a young girl's journey of discovery towards the understanding of passion, imagination and love in the glorious palace of the Beast.

This is Laurence Boswell's third recreation of this story, which he describes as a "fairy-tale thriller" and is rooted in the world of 18th century France.

Beauty is played by Irish red-head Aoife McMahon, making her RSC debut, and Adam Levy, who appeared in the award-winning film The Gladiator with Russell Crowe, plays The Beast. John Bowler, who has been in TV's Peak Practice, Grafters, Cadfael and Crocodile Shoes, plays Beauty's father.

The show starts on December 1 with a run of preview performances when the cast and crew will complete their fine-tuning before the press night on December 10.

Main performances are from December 11 to February 22.

Ticket prices range from £5 to £34 and can be booked by telephoning 0870 609 1110, on line at www.rsc.org.uk or by calling in to the theatre box office.