Waiting in the wings

Red Road was in competition for the Palme d'Or which meant that inside the cinema was an audience of 2600 fellow actors, directors, stars and critics. For Dickie it was a potentially career-defining moment. Asifthatwasn'tdauntingenough,the 36-year-oldstillhadn'tevenseenthe completed picture - though she did know it featured the most explicit sex scene ever contained in a Scottish film.

In the end, Red Road lost out on the Palme d'Or to Ken Loach's The Wind That Shakes The Barley, scripted by Scottish writer Paul Laverty (of whom, more later). But Arnold's film did go on to win the Jury Prize,anotinconsiderablefeatfora first-timedirectorandacoupforthe producers of the Advance Party project, a proposed triptych of Scottish films of which Red Road was the first.

With the hurly burly done, Dickie left the south of France and returned to Scotland. She took back the shoes and the dress - no fag burns, luckily - and caught up with her family: three-year-old daughter Molly and partner Kenny, a theatrical sound technician. She really was, she says, "in shock".

"I'd heard of Cannes," she adds, "but I'd never followed films and I'd never seen many films because there wasn't a cinema near me when I was growing up. So I had no idea of the scale of it and what it meant to be in competition there. I really didn't."

But, like so much else in Dickie's life, that has changed now. The success of Red Road at Cannes propelled both film and lead actress onto the world's festival circuit. Dickie gave a lot of interviews to a lot of journalists, hungoutwithBritishdirectorShane Meadows at France's Dinard Festival, just missed Gwyneth Paltrow and Chris Martin in a restaurant at the Sundance Festival but did attend a party hosted by Variety, at which John Cusack was a guest. She didn't actually see him, though. "I'm rubbish at recognising people," she says.

Laverty she did meet, however, at the British Independent Film Award ceremony in London, where Dickie picked up the best actress award. Both had peripatetic childhoods but both spent some time as childreninandaroundWigtown,in Dumfries and Galloway. Long into the night they swapped tales of Scotland's book town.

We'realongwayfromCannesnow, though not quite so far from Wigtown: Glasgow's Tramway is the venue and we are here, notionally, to discuss Dickie's new role as patron of theatre company Solar Bear, whose youth wing is performing a piece called Broken at the Tramway this week.

Dickie supports the company in part because its artistic director is her old drama-school friend, Debbie Andrews. But she is also aware that its outreach programmes and its work with young people are exactly the kind of things that got her involved in acting in her teens.

Although Dickie was born in East Kilbride, her family moved around a lot. Her father was first a dairy farmer then a gardener and, as well as Dumfries and Galloway, she spent parts of her childhood in Perthshire andAyrshire.Saturdaymorningacting lessons became her way of dealing with the problems of assimilation.

"I loved drama classes. I loved doing all the different characters. It was a good thing to do if you were moving schools a lot because you get a lot of insecurities about being the new girl. I found drama to be a good way to explore the different emotions I was going through at the time as well."

Dickie knew from an early age that she wanted to be an actor. Even so, for a long time she would cringe when anyone asked her what she did.

"It took me so long to even say I was an actor," she says. "I would feel so embarrassed, it sounded so pretentious. I come from such a working-class background and there's nobody in the arts in my family. My dad and mum were really supportive but in their hearts they probably thought I should be doing acting as a hobby."

When she left school she went to college in Kirkcaldy to study for a national certificate in drama. Then, in 1990, she won a place at the Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Dance. She has been in Glasgow ever since. "Glasgow's my home now," she says. "It's the longest I've ever stayed anywhere."

Dickiestartedtoworkintheatre, performing with some of Scotland's best companies, but her break came in 2000 when she landed the role of club DJ Lex in the BBC Scotland series Tinseltown. But what should have been her career launchpad ended up being quite the opposite.

"My father died during the filming of Tinseltown and it was a difficult time," she says. "I was pretty much struggling with dealing with that and I didn't really have it in me to use it as a stepping stone. I didn't really think about it at that point."

At the time she didn't even have an agent. Shedoesnow,butreluctantlyIsense. Certainly the thought of celebrity fills her with dread, as does the notion of capitalising on her increased profile. You would never describe her as thrusting.

"Those words capitalise' and celebrity' fill me with horror," she laughs, head in hands. "It feels so odd to have those two words used in relation to me. I don't have a plan of action. My plan is that I'll keep on having auditions and maybe I'll get one."

One recent role for which she successfully auditionedturned out to be the most difficult she has ever had to play - Cathy Delaney, a mother on trial for killing her two children. It was based on the true case of Maggie Strobbe and Luc de Winne, a couple who murdered their children in 1999 in the Belgian town of Aalst, which gives the play its name. Aalst was a co-production between Tramway, the National Theatre of Scotland and Victoria, a Belgian company. "It was a grim piece," says Dickie, "and the hardest thing I've ever done."

The play toured to London in the spring, where it received rave reviews, and may yet tour internationally. For the time being, Dickie is glad the run is over. It was hard, she says, for a mother to live in the head of a child-killer every night. She was glad to leave Delaney behind. But, she adds: "I feel I have a responsibility to play people like that and to give them a voice. People that are not necessarily good or nice or who have good lives. I feel a responsibility to give people like that a hearing."

Only slightly less harrowing was the sex scene in Red Road. It took five hours to shoot on a closed set in a Red Road high rise, with just Dickie, co-star Tony Curran, Arnold and the director of photography present.

"I don't want to be naked in front of a camera but I have a job to do and if the job asks that of me and I feel it's necessary then I'll do it and I'll do it to the best of my ability," says Dickie. "But sex scenes are very difficult, there's no getting away from it."

That she and Curran had been at drama school together and knew each other well made it a little easier. Humour helped too.

"You do have a laugh," Dickie admits. "As soon as the first shot cut I jumped under the quilt. I had the whole thing over me because I was bright red."

The journey that began with Red Road continues this autumn when Dickie begins work on Old Dogs, the second instalment in the Advance Party project set up between Glasgow-basedSigmaProductionsand maverick Swedish director Lars Von Trier. The rules of the project state that each film be shot in Glasgow over six weeks using the same actors playing the same characters. Beyond that, anything goes.

Old Dogs is to be directed by Morag McKinnon, originally from Haddington but based in Glasgow for the last decade or so. LikeArnoldandDickieherself,thisis McKinnon's first full-length feature though she has a more than decent calling card in the form of award-winning short film, Home. Unlike Red Road, which was grim if gripping,herfilmisablackcomedycentred on Andrew Armour, who playedDickie's father-in-law in Red Road. Not that they are necessarily still related in this film.

"The characters don't have to have the same relationships in each film," explains Dickie. "The directors can do what they want. I must admit when I first took on the job I didn't actually understand it. I thought it would be a trilogy as in continuing stories. But as long as they use each character in each film they can have any relationship, any occupation."

So she could be a vet in Old Dogs? Or a judge at Crufts? "Yes." But not a CCTV operator, as she was in Red Road? "Not as far as I know." She's giving nothing else away except to say that: "I'm really excited about working with another female director."

Dickie's new friend Shane Meadows, director of the acclaimed This Is England, described her performance in Red Road as brave, gut-wrenching, believable and honest. Hisproducer,MarkHerbert, praised Dickie's "quality of stillness" and the "ferociousness in her eyes". But Meadows also said that Dickie's next challenge would be to find another role as good as that one. In other words, that she does need to capitalise on the success of Red Road, if not for celebrity's sake, then for the sake of continuing to do brave, gut-wrenching, honest work.

I put Meadows's advice to her.

"I would like to think I could find another role like it," she says in response. "But whether I will or not I don't know. You don't always get the things you go up for, or you're not always right for the part and that's the way it is. Having done Red Road opens more doors; maybe I get to audition for things I wouldn't have before. But I'm not great at auditions. I get very nervous. I don't feel I come across very well. Plus you're always up against names'."

But she is a name now. "Am I?" she laughs. "I'll just have to wait and see if I'm lucky enough".

Luck, hopefully, will have nothing to do with it.

Broken is at the Tramway from June 6-9; Old Dogs begins filming in the autumn