ACTRESS Janie Dee will star alongside Clive Francis in the resurrected stage-adaptation of 84 Charing Cross Road at Salisbury Playhouse in February.

The play premiered at the Salisbury Playhouse in 1981 and went on to be successful on the West End and Broadway and won writer and director James Roose Evans a number of awards.

Janie takes on the role of Helene Hanff, the writer of the original book, who begins a long distance correspondence with a bookseller.

Dee said: “It is really a sort of love of words that brings these two people into contact with one another.

“They never meet, but an awful lot happens during their time of writing to one another – a lot grows between them in that time as well.”

Dee is rehearsing the play in London at the moment, while keeping up other commitments, but is looking forward to coming to Salisbury for rehearsals and fully immersing herself in the play.

The actress always throws herself into the characters she is depicting, this time adopting a brilliant New York accent.

Dee admits: “I am becoming a bit like her!

“I’m turning into a carbon copy of this woman, the most unlikely situation because she’s nothing like me.”

The actress believes that getting to know your character is essential: “When you’re in the middle of a first night and you might be trembling with nerves, what is going to help you to lose that is the fact that you’ve done all this research so that you can lose yourself in the character.”

Dee started her acting career at Salisbury Playhouse in an Alan Ayckbourn play.

She later worked with the playwright and when doing a musical with him in London he suggested she do more “straight stuff”.

She replied that she would love to and he told her he would write something for her: “Then a script arrived and it was this amazing play that was all about a robot, called Comic Potential. And this was such a big hit.

“I didn’t realise when we were rehearsing it that it was such an amazing play. It wasn’t until New York that I read that someone else had realised. He actually wrote in Time Magazine: ‘If you see no other play while you live, see this one.’”

84 Charing Cross Road will be at Salisbury Playhouse from February 5 – 28.

Tickets are available from salisburyplayhouse.com or on 01722 320 333.