Stratford actor Claire Nielson turns author after Fawlty Towers and Two Ronnies fame

Working with the likes of John Cleese, Ronnie Corbett, Ronnie Barker, Les Dawson, Dick Emery and Prunella Scales convinced Claire, who lives in Stratford with her husband, actor Paul Greenwood, that comic timing is instinctive.

“I loved working with Les because he was such a darling man,” she recalled. “Many people didn’t realise he was also very clever – extremely well-read and a brilliant pianist.”

After hours of rehearsing sketches until they were word-perfect, Les would nip into the BBC club and have a few pints. Once filming began he’d start improvising, so she’d have to go with the flow.

“My cues weren’t there, which was a bit terrifying, but he was so wonderful I didn’t mind,” she laughed.

Describing both Ronnie Corbett and Ronnie Barker as “divine to work with,” she describes them as “very different”.

“Big Ronnie [Barker] was shy and quite highly strung, while Little Ronnie [Corbett] was much more confident,” she said.

Ironically, because she was already a successful actress with a stream of well-respected drama credits, her agent was not amused when she opted to do comedy. Claire, now 85, explained: “My agent was furious with me for doing Fawlty Towers and warned I’d ruin my career. “Back then, pretty young women who did light entertainment stopped being offered dramatic parts but I’d always preferred comedy, so I didn’t care.”

While growing up in Glasgow in the 1940s, she was bitten by the acting bug after seeing a performance of Swan Lake.

“It introduced me to this other world that was beautiful and glamorous and I remember thinking: ‘That’s where I belong, not in this sooty city.”

She won a place at the prestigious Royal Scottish Academy of Dramatic Art (now the Royal Scottish Conservatoire) and honed her acting skills through years of theatre rep in Glasgow, Perth, Birmingham and London.

This proved a solid foundation for a versatile career that’s ranged from playing opposite Trevor Howard in the 1971 film Kidnapped, to roles in popular drama series such as Dr Finlay’s Casebook, Z-Cars, Upstairs, Downstairs, The Brothers, Taggart and Monarch of the Glen.

In her mid-forties, she swapped the stage to study for an English Literature degree at Cambridge University at the same time as Peggy, her daughter from her first marriage to actor Dennis Vance.

Fittingly, the latest plot twist in Claire’s career is also closely connected to family – her four grandchildren aged 16-28 who have always loved hearing stories about her childhood in Scotland. Although home was Glasgow city, holidays were spent at her grandfather’s rambling Victorian house on the shores of the Holy Loch in Argyllshire. Claire, her sister Elsa and brother John would spend weeks riding bikes, swimming, fishing and messing about in boats. Peggy, who’s a publisher, always encouraged her mum to write down the tales but Claire’s life is busy – as well as acting and directing, she’s also co-director of The Drama Pool which takes acting workshops into schools – and so the right moment didn’t arrive until lockdown. The result is The House at Strone, a Swallows and Amazons-style adventure set immediately after the war.

Following the death of their grandfather and their mother feeling too unwell to travel, eight-year-old Claire and her siblings – then 13½ and 11 – persuaded their father to let them spend summer alone at Strone and it’s this period which inspired the plot.

Claire has been writing plays and stories since childhood and even set up her own ‘theatre’ aged 10, roping in her pals as actors.

“As writer, director and producer of my own Woodland Strone Theatre, I was forever chasing after my friends as they cycled off into the distance, shouting: ‘Come back! We haven’t finished rehearsals’,” she laughed.

She’s already working on the sequel, The House in Glasgow\, and has plans for a third, provisionally entitled Back to Strone.

A keen artist, Claire also painted and drew the illustrations on the cover and in the book. And when it comes to dialogue, she found it helpful to run it past husband Paul, whose long association with the RSC brought them to Stratford. Paul played Rosie in the 12-year BBC series of the same name and has also appeared in popular TV shows such as Heartbeat and Our Friends in the North. The couple both took part in the recent challenge to read Shakespeare’s 38 plays, two poems and 154 sonnets to help fund the restoration of the town hall’s Shakespeare statue.

Claire pointed out: “When you read aloud, you hear the clunky bits of dialogue, and it certainly helps that we’ve both been acting all our lives.”

The book’s been well received and feedback has included suggestions that it would make an exciting children’s TV or streaming series.

“I would absolutely love to write the script, if that happened,” Claire said.

“And, actually, it would be incredibly cheap to film,” she joked.