PAUL Clayton will never forget his professional stage debut. It came more than 20 years ago, in pantomime at York Theatre Royal, with fellow new boys Gary Oldman and Peter Howitt. Paul played the front of the panto cow, Peter the back.

Oldman went on to hit the Hollywood heights; Howitt starred in Bread and wrote and directed the Gwyneth Paltrow movie Sliding Doors; and Paul appeared in Brideshead Revisited and All Creatures Great And Small, spent three years in the Royal Shakespeare Company and has directed 30 stage productions.

At present he is back in York, playing the blustering Councillor Albert Parker in J B Priestley's When We Are Married, his sixth Theatre Royal production. It is his first theatre role in six years as he has been concentrating on TV, film and corporate work at conferences with his company The Team.

"A friend of mine was coming up to read for the York show after doing the play in Leicester, and she said to me she thought I'd be very good in it," Paul recalls. "It was always a play I wanted to do professionally from my drama school days when I played Henry Ormonroyd, the newspaper photographer.

"So I wrote to the Theatre Royal on January 2, when my agent was still closed after Christmas, and I arranged to meet Jim director Jim Hooper and Damian artistic director Damian Cruden. I read for Albert Parker, Damian read the part of Annie Parker - a very sympathetic reading, I might say!"

Paul is finding Councillor Parker a joy to play. "He's a fantastic monster in a wonderful play and the great thing about him is that he does undergo a redemption," he says.

For this West Riding comedy, Paul is drawing on his Yorkshire roots. "I was brought up in Thrybergh, between Rotherham and Doncaster, and I must admit there's a bit of my grandfather and father in my portrayal," he says.

"There's that thing of Yorkshiremen finding it difficult to admit they're wrong, and that's the case with Councillor Parker, who would regard going back on something as an admission of failure."

Paul's father did not consider acting to be a "proper job", until his son worked for the Royal Shakespeare Company. Nevertheless Clayton senior, who was a miner and shopkeeper, did have his own theatrical career. "He used to do amateur dramatics in the village, and in fact he played Dyson, the reporter, in When We Are Married, but his acting was never something that he talked about."

What of his mother? She will be coming up to York to see the Theatre Royal production, just as she did when he made his professional bow there.

When We Are Married runs at York Theatre Royal until March 29. Box office: 01904 623568.

Updated: 09:29 Friday, March 21, 2003