PLAYING the wicked Carabosse in Sleeping Beauty at the Grand Opera House is just perfect for Deena Payne.

The former Emmerdale soap queen – 18 years as post mistress, shopkeeper and village gossip-monger Viv Hope until she was toast in the infamous arson attack of early January 2011 – stepped into the York pantomime when Charlene Tilson’s filming commitments in the revived Dallas put paid to her star billing.

“This is my first time at the Grand Opera House and it’s a lovely theatre,” says Deena, surveying the auditorium from one of the boxes. “It’s especially lovely as it’s only half an hour from home – I live between Harrogate and Wetherby – and I was only going to do a panto this Christmas if it was near home.”

Deena, originally from Orpington, Kent, moved to Yorkshire to take up her soap role in Emmerdale and has never left.

“I arrived as a hands-on mum; my son was six months old when I started playing Viv, eighteen-and-a-half when I finished, and we love it up here, so we’ve stayed,” says the 58-year-old actress, dancer and singer.

Much of Deena’s calendar since Viv’s farewell from Emmerdale has been taken up with tours of Calendar Girls, “pretty well going everywhere over the past two years”.

You may have seen plenty of her in the role of Cora – the one always sat in the buff at the piano smiling over her shoulder in the tour posters – in such venues as the Leeds Grand Theatre and Scarborough’s Futurist Theatre.

“I took over there at a day’s notice, when I’d just finished tour six of the show, and Jennifer Ellison hurt her wrist, so I popped back in for three weeks of tour seven,” she says.

Deena arrived in York for rehearsals for Sleeping Beauty straight from Calendar Girls’ run in Dundee, and she has loved being in a show just as Yorkshire as Emmerdale but so universal in its appeal.

“It touches people’s hearts because it’s funny but very poignant,” she says. “And it’s been fun working with Lynda Bellingham, Lesley Joseph, Sue Holderness, Kacey Ainsworth…”

After her travels, Deena is back on Yorkshire turf this winter, the turf she strutted as Viv in Emmerdale. It was the defining role of her career and yet when Deena arrived in 1993, Viv was a blank canvas.

“No one really told me anything, so I kind of made her myself after I found out you were expected to make your own character – and if they don’t say anything, then you’re doing all right.”

She was not always the mini-skirted Viv so fondly remembered by Emmerdale devotees. “When Vic left the show [Viv’s second husband, Vic was killed in an armed robbery on Christmas Day in 1998], I decided ‘No more trousers for Viv’,” says Deena.

“I wanted back-combed hair as I knew it would suit me, and then a writer called Matthew Westwood picked up on my comic side, and he wrote really well for me, not only to exorcise my demons – and I quite like wearing short skirts, but I’d never do it myself unless I was playing Viv.”

Why was Viv such an appealing character? “I used to really go for it, as I thought ‘That’s exactly what I’d do myself’’. She’s a tart with a heart whose bark was worse than her bite and she’d hang on to the gossip,” says Deena.

At the time of her Emmerdale exit, Deena described her finale – sozzled and asleep on the sofa while Emmerdale burned – as “anti-climactic”, yet on reflection she was ready to leave. “Every year you’re offered a contract and in this age it’s difficult to say ‘No’, but my son was now independent and going to college, and when I was released from Emmerdale, I was independent too and was able to go back to musical theatre which I’d done for 23 years before Emmerdale,” she says.

Looking back, Deena enjoyed her Emmerdale rollercoaster ride and its many challenges with “some solid drama and some girly stuff”.

Pantomime has plenty of both too. On leaving Emmerdale, she was cast as the Wicked Queen in Snow White at the Manchester Opera House, and after switching to fairyland last Christmas for Cinderella in Darlington, she returns to the dark side in York as Carabosse at the Grand Opera House.

“I love doing all the dark stuff! I was Fairy Godmother last year and I loved it, but I had to be a cheeky goody; I couldn’t play a goody-goody,” says Deena.

“I don’t mind being booed and as the baddie I even get to do a Lady Gaga number – Born This Way.”

• Sleeping Beauty runs at Grand Opera House, York, from next Friday to January 6. Box office: 0844 871 3024 or atgtickets.com/york