No obstacle is too much for Calendar Girl Lynda Bellingham, she tells Laura Davis

LYNDA BELLINGHAM’S life story reads like the script of a soap opera.

She was conceived illegitimately during her born-again Christian mother’s “one mistake”, adopted as a baby by a warm-hearted couple, found fame as an actor and escaped an abusive marriage to her second husband to eventually end up wed to a Mediterranean mortgage broker she calls “Mr Spain”.

“Like the rest of my life, nothing is easy,” she says of her role in The Calendar Girls, the true story of a group of Women’s Institute members who stripped off for charity turned into a play by Merseyside-born writer Tim Firth.

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Bellingham appeared in the original stage play, which was in turn based on Firth’s 2003 film, after fighting for the role of Chris.

Miss August, whose dignity is kept intact by a carefully placed tea towel, is the feistier of the two leads. The Loose Women guest presenter was determined to get the part, having found herself typecast as mumsy thanks to her long-running part in the much-loved Oxo adverts: “I couldn’t get a job as an actress that was in any way slightly sexy,” she explains.

“I wanted to audition for The Graduate to play Mrs Robinson, but they wouldn’t even see me because my image was wrong for the part.”

She persuaded the play’s producers to let her read for the part of Chris, over the shyer Annie, and clinched it. She has returned to the role for the current Calendar Girls tour, which comes to the Liverpool Empire next week.