When she was a child, Cara Kelly was taken to see Cinderella at Glasgow’s Citizens’ theatre. It was a day she would never forget, thanks in no small measure to David Hayman’s performance as Buttons.

“We’ve got a very special person in the audience today,” announced Hayman from the glittering stage and promptly led the audience in a round of Happy Birthday for the seven-year-old Kelly, who was born on Christmas Day.

The little girl was elated, but the best was still to come. A beautiful Cinderella entered, dressed as a princess with an entourage of four Shetland ponies. “It was the ponies that did it for me,” recalls Kelly, her eyes twinkling. “I went home and told my sister I was going to be an actress.”

She was as good as her word. Now, 35 years on, we are sitting together in the foyer of the same Glasgow theatre at the end of a day’s rehearsal for Sean O’Casey’s The Shadow of a Gunman. And Kelly is playing a leading role.

To find the actress in an Irish classic is no surprise. It was in this same theatre she starred last December in Molly Sweeney, Brian Friel’s three-hander about a Donegal woman reluctantly cured of her blindness by her zealous husband. Kelly gave a mesmerising and award-winning performance that was warm-hearted, generous and tragic.

This time around she plays Mrs Grigson, whose neighbour Donal Davoren is mistakenly taken for an IRA gunman. Things turn nasty when a real stash of bombs is found on the premises and the British Army turns up at the door.

As Grigson, Kelly’s character shoulders many burdens, stoically putting up with an alcoholic husband and delivering news of the army’s activities. “She has to do comedy and tragedy,” says Kelly. “It’s a bit of a balancing act.”

Despite the Irish roles and the pronounced inflection of her speech, Kelly was born and brought up in Glasgow. Her father, a labourer from Fermanagh, and her mother, a cleaner from Armagh, emigrated to Scotland but always maintained close links with Northern Ireland and eventually retired there.

“I was mainly brought up here, but in an Irish culture,” she says. “My dad had his own ceilidh band and in my family you had to sing, dance, play an instrument — or be at least civil! I wasn’t much good at any of them, but what came out in me was an ability to mimic, to observe and to remember lines.”

Her love of Ireland is plain, but she knows it was Scotland that gave her family of Northern Irish Catholics a welcome. “Glasgow’s open to me and it’s a city that’s given me and my family work,” she says. “Where my parents came from that was denied them.”

The youngest of four, Kelly studied politics and history at Aberdeen University and trained at the Royal Scottish Acadamy of Music and Drama in Glasgow. She never shook the theatre bug, even when she took a few years out in the late-1990s to teach children with learning difficulties.

“It became my objective to put on wee productions with them,” she says. “It was a great job, I really enjoyed it and it helped me get rid of a lot of inhibitions in acting.”

On stage, her career has taken in roles in London at the Royal Court, the Donmar Warehouse and the Almeida; in Edinburgh in a Fringe First-winning turn for Clyde Unity Theatre; and in a string of appearances at the Citizens’ and Edinburgh’s Royal Lyceum.

But it was Molly Sweeney that gave the step up. In that show, she was spotted by the National Theatre of Scotland and given a small part in Chris Hannan’s Elizabeth Gordon Quinn. When Siobhan Redmond backed out

of the title role, director John Tiffany asked Kelly to take her place.

“It was strange because that only happens in Hollywood musicals. It’s usually Judy Garland or young ingenues.” Recalling that childhood moment of joy, she adds: “It was like Cinderella.”

She’s well aware, though, of that old adage that you make your own luck. As Kelly sees it, she got her break thanks to a rare display of self-promotion.

“You start off thinking this business works through being patient and believing good things come to those who wait,” she says. “But if you don’t ask, you don’t get. I asked for Molly Sweeney when I heard they were doing the play. It took a bit of guts, but I’m glad I did pursue it because the play was a joy from end to end.”

Kelly is a subtle, intelligent and truthful performer on stage, qualities that are not ideal for getting work in the first place. “You have to have a thick skin and a gossamer skin,” she says. “To do the job you have to have such immediate access to your whole range of emotions. On the other hand, you have to develop the skin of a rhino to deal with rejection, to get through the audition and to deal with the reviews.”

She’s wryly amused at the vagaries of a profession that has thrust her into the limelight at the age of 42 and feels it’s time for her to be branching out.

“In terms of getting lead parts, the best age is probably in your early thirties,” she says. “But I’m hoping to spread my wings in other ways — like directing and writing. You see so many people get ahead — they have a lot of push that I’ve just got to conjure up from somewhere.”

The Shadow of a Gunman, Citizens’ theatre, Glasgow, November 3­18

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