There was a time when Julie Graham was British drama’s answer to the question Dennis Pennis once asked of Demi Moore, that if it were tastefully done and in no way gratuitous was there a role for which she’d consider keeping her clothes on? Graham was the small screen’s resident raver, a one-woman festival of naturism. For some unexplained reason the characters she played were forever finding themselves in bedrooms — or in parks, or on methods of public transport — that they seemed to find uncomfortably warm. This regrettable situation never failed to concern Graham’s male counterparts, of course, who’d then attempt to rectify the situation by loosening Graham’s clothing and instigating vigorous bouts of cooling physical exercise.

Who can forget, for example, Graham’s appearance in The Big Man, a film in which she demonstrated that the need for bare-knuckle boxing in a struggling Scottish village was scarcely an excuse not to keep herself well-ventilated? Or in The Near Room in which a murky cocktail of blackmail and murder on the mean streets of Glasgow alerted Graham all too typically to the likelihood that someone had been fiddling with the thermostat?

Even on television — and even when a housewives’ favourite such as Martin Clunes was playing opposite her, and beneath her at several points, as he did in William and Mary — Graham rarely missed the opportunity to keep herself strictly at room temperature.

The titles of her various productions alone — Preaching to the Perverted, Between the Sheets, Bedrooms and Hallways — were sufficient in themselves to indicate a certain adult leaning. “I tell you,” she says. “Three days in a tacky semi-detached in Croydon pretending to have sex with Martin Clunes — it’s the ultimate way of getting to know someone really quickly.”

Back then, she was a sort of native equivalent to Angelina Jolie, an imperious, statuesque brunette with the hint of something waywardly racy in her background, a bronco quality. Unlike, say, Helena Bonham Carter or Kate Winslet she had several big tattoos, a thistle and a star, plastered about her person, adornments with which viewers became closely familiar.

She campaigned for the Scottish Socialist party in its early days — “with Peter Mullan and Tommy Sheridan and all that crew. Yeah, it was a fantastic, defiant atmosphere. And then it ended all so distastefully . . . ” She was also caught up in the London poll tax riots of 1990 — “I didn’t join in but, then, you didn’t really have much choice, you had to defend yourself.”

After decamping from Irvine in her late teens she worked as a receptionist at the Pussy Galore strip club in Soho, London.

“It was my first acting job, really,” she says. “I was asked to get rid of my Scottish accent because I was scaring the punters away. I was too sullen and aggressive, the boss said.

“Soho was absolutely my favourite place in the world, I wanted to be there all the time. It’s a very transient place so you can really feel that you’re part of something very quickly without actually being part of anything, and I really liked that.

“I mean, I assumed there was some form of prostitution going on in the club but I never saw it. I just stood in the doorway shouting, come on in love, don’t be shy, all that sort of thing. But not in a Scottish accent.”

Even so, one could never help forming an image of Graham on the back of a Kawasaki ZZR-1400, laughing maniacally as she accelerated towards the horizon, then possibly stopping to divest herself of her horribly clammy outfit.

That was then, however. Graham started feeling the chill, it seems, in the early years of the current decade after the birth of her first daughter, Edie May, in 2004. Cyd followed in 2006, their father being Joseph Bennett, also an actor.

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