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LOCAL ACTOR John Coop rarely gives interviews to the press but our arts correspondent was able to catch up with him recently.

Correspondent: I believe you were recently filmed in a new production of Wuthering Heights. How did that come about?

JC: My agent knew I was available for film work as my run in a new play in the West End, as crowd member number six, was unexpectedly cancelled at short notice and so I took it on. I like to keep busy as you know and unusually there was nothing else in the pipeline.

JC: Well, you have to understand that villager number 17, my part, is pivotal to the whole film. He is a complex character to start with and I have to say that I had a few sleepless nights working out just how to approach the role at such short notice. I always like to get inside the head of any character I play and it can take a lot out of one.

JC: Oh yes! It’s easy to make the mistake of thinking that Heathrow and Kitty are …

JC: Yes indeed. Easy to think they live in a vacuum but “No Man is an Island” as Miss Kate Bush so cleverly pointed out and in order to see and understand them in context and to empathise with their predicament it is necessary to have a context, as one might say, and villager 17 provides that context. He is more than just a local member of the peasantry and when we realise, in scene 26, that villager 17 is the Church organist we suddenly realise “These are real people and they live in the real world. They appreciate music, they enjoy good food, they love and are loved, they have opinions about the nature of the Holy Trinity and they have finer feelings”. Heathwright and Kat suddenly come into focus…

Correspondent: Heathcliff and Catherine? And I think no man is an island may have been John Donne?

JC: Yes indeed. I have to say that the other players left it all to me. They just milled about looking like extras in a film and I had to carry the whole affair but then I have had the experience you see.

Correspondent: Were your early years influential in the development of your art?

JC: Rossendale was still independent in those days and life was hard. My father worked in the mines or the mill or some such. I forgot to ask him which and he wasn’t a talkative type so he never mentioned it.

Correspondent: Did he come home covered in coal dust or was he deafened by the machinery?

JC: I am an actor not a painter! Such questions are pointless addressed to me as I live only in the world of make believe and fantasy. It is the only way to develop the necessary skills to present the real world in sharp focus which is the lot and the raison d’être of an actor’s existence, as M Marcel Marceau might have said.

JC: I think you are making a joke but I’ll let it pass. Comedy is such a corrupted art!

Correspondent: I wanted to take this opportunity to ask how you got into acting in the first place.

JC: I did not so much as get into acting as it got into me if you see what I mean. I was born to act and fate took over. I first trod the boards as a boy in Nether Crawshawbooth at the local Am Dram festival (so very droll! – more “am” than “dram” I’m afraid). They still talk about me in Hamlet to this day.

JC: I wanted to play the Prince but my voice hadn’t broken and a girl called Angela Arkwright got that part. It later turned out she was the producer’s cousin’s granddaughter and there was a heck of a row. That’s how I learnt my trade – disappointment and backbiting and so on. All part of the job I fear in this line.

Correspondent: I think we’d better leave it there. Thank you so much for your time.

Mr Coop pictured in a scene from his last film - The Russian romantic classic "Dr Zhivago" - in which he played the part of an unsuccessful plant seller at a village gala