Her portrayal of Mistress Quickly for the Royal Shakespeare Company was “splendidly busty and generous”, “marvellous” and “deeply moving”. Her epitaph to Falstaff reduced one notably hard-to-please critic to tears. Her Tamora in the RSC’s Titus Andronicus was universally hailed and her performances as Emilia in Othello have grown from “good to excellent”, according to the Financial Times. The Sunday Times called her Medea “voluptuous, vulnerable and hard as granite”. She is, according to critics, “an enormous talent”, “uncompromising” and “a tour de force”.

The actress in question is not Judi or Maggie or Eileen but Maureen Beattie, a woman more likely to be cast as a pantomime than as a theatrical dame. If you recognise her, it is probably because of her role as Nurse Sandra Nicholl in Casualty or as Chief Superintendent Jane Fitzwilliam in The Bill. Readers of a certain age know her as the daughter of the variety performer Johnny Beattie.

There is something faintly tragic in the way Beattie’s show-stopping performances in some of the great classical roles have failed to bring her the sort of renown she would have enjoyed had she been a male actor tackling similar roles to similar acclaim. In a trawl of 500 press cuttings covering 15 years, I failed to find a bad review.

It’s not that Beattie, now back in Glasgow to play the leading role in Ibsen’s Ghosts at the Citizens Theatre, is unrecognised. It’s just that after each lauded performance, there is a wilderness period, broken sporadically by reading Radio 4’s Book of The Week or guest-starring in a feature-length episode of Lewis.

It’s particularly surprising that her portrayal of Medea, in her friend Liz Lochhead’s highly acclaimed version of the play, did not bring greater rewards. Universally hailed as the stand-out performance of the millennium Edinburgh Festival, it was described at the time as “the Fringe’s most successful show”.

“It was the epitome of everything I want my career to be about,” says Beattie, after a morning of intense rehearsals for her new play. “People were ringing me up asking if I’d written the reviews myself. That was Liz at her absolute finest — her wonderful, muscular use of language. But the bottom line is that there is only so long you can go on working for that money. It was an absolute pittance.”

The production was commissioned by Graham McLaren for Theatre Babel. Equity minimum pay rates range from about £350 to £550 a week, but to employ more actors, the company (with Beattie’s blessing) negotiated a lower rate. The production toured in Canada and India but could not afford to accept all the invitations offered to it. Had the National Theatre of Scotland been in place then, Medea might have had the same exposure as Black Watch.

“It cost me money to do the job because I live in London,” Beattie says, tucking into a baked potato and tuna. “That was my choice, but that’s the situation we find ourselves in in Scotland, and it is a real consideration. There is a mortgage to pay. The art is fantastic but a girl’s got to eat.”

Nevertheless, her sense of anticlimax when it was over was intense. “I felt like somebody in my family had died,” she says. “There is a little bit of my heart that is forever Medea and I hope against hope that I get to do it again.”

Beattie is intensely private about her life. She lives alone in south London, has never married and does not have children. “There has been love in my life but it is not there at present,” she says. “Who knows what will happen in the future?”

You wouldn’t think she was in her mid-fifties. With her dark hair and piercingly blue eyes, she has aged better than most. Medea climaxes with her killing her children to wreck revenge on her unfaithful husband. In Ghosts, she again plays a strong woman betrayed by her husband and struggling with a dying son. What does she draw on to make these roles so convincing?

“You have to dig so deep,” she says. “I don’t have children, so I can’t imagine that. But I have found it easier to get in touch with strong emotions on stage since my mum died. She died 15 years ago, so it’s not a raw wound any more, but I was aware that something had changed in me since I had experienced that.”

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