FOR actress Jan Harvey, taking on the role of Annie, the bereaved widow at the heart of Calendar Girls, coincides with a number of significant anniversaries.

“It’s ten years since I was last on stage and it’s my 40th year in the business.” she explains.

“Doing Calendar Girls appealed from the moment I was asked to be in it. It’s a classy piece, a feel-good play. It’s about love and friendship and support. You laugh. You cry. It’s life-affirming.

"It’s so beautifully choreographed and the calendar shoot scene is such a small part of the play anyway that it really doesn’t worry me. And the audience reaction to the scene was joyous and not in the least bit salacious.

“I grew up in Penzance in Cornwall, with various aunts and uncles living on remote farms and although I was only vaguely aware of the WI at the time, I know what it's like to live in an isolated community and how the WI brings people together.

“I’m hoping that doing live theatre is a bit like riding a bike – you can soon pick it up again!

After such a long absence from the stage, does Jan have to give herself a kind of theatre MOT and go back to the skills she hasn’t used for a decade?

“I’ve been working on my voice and making sure that I have both the volume and the breath control.” explains Jan. “It’s a very demanding show technically, with lots of quick changes, and you’re relying on everybody else on stage for it all to come together. The more we do it, the more organic it will become, with its own ebb and flow.”

Forty years ago Jan began her career with a Theatre-in-Education job attached to the Theatre Royal in York.

Until then, she seems to have been destined for the classroom rather than the stage but it was while she was doing her teacher training in Cambridge that she became involved in the thriving university drama scene.

She joined the profession just as the fabled days of local rep were drawing to a close. Jan remembers the dizzying variety of parts she played in one season at Worthing.

“I was a witch in Macbeth, choreographed the musical Stop The World, I Want To Get Off, I was in the D.H. Lawrence play The Daughter-in-Law, I did Agatha Christie’s And Then There Were None and I played in Dracula, with fangs specially made for me by a local dentist!”

Jan describes her four decades years in the profession as “fabulous”. One of the highlights of her career is undoubtedly the six series of Howards’ Way, the BBC’s glossy Sunday night drama that gripped the nation for most of the 1980s. It was a saga of everyday boat-building folk, set among Hampshire’s sailing fraternity and shot around the picturesque River Hamble.

“It’s wonderful to have been in something that remains so special in people’s memories,” says Jan. “They were six very happy years that we spent on the series but in the early days we weren’t sure how it would be received. I’ve done masses of television before and since and you never know if something is going to work until the public have had a chance to see it. In its day, Howards’ Way was described as the British answer to Dallas and Dynasty.”

Jan looks back on her 40 years as an actress with some satisfaction but also surprise.

“I’m always amazed to be still working.” she smiles. “I’ve never been a great reader of scripts and there have been plays which I've turned down which I shouldn’t have and plays which I should have turned down but I didn’t. But I have no regrets whatsoever. See Jan in Calendar Girls at The Mayflower from Monday to Saturday.

Call 023 8071 1811 or visit mayflower.org.uk