When Keith Waterhouse wrote Billy Liar, little did he know it would become one of the seminal plays and films of the early 1960s.

The play is a comic masterpiece centred around an undertaker’s clerk who juggles three girlfriends and escapes his humdrum life by dreaming of becoming a successful scriptwriter and weaving ever-more complex daydreams that cause havoc in his real life.

The play was first performed in the West End starring Albert Finney and then made the transition to the big screen with Tom Courtenay and Julie Christie.

Also starring in the film as Barbara, one of Billy’s girlfriends, was Helen Fraser who is bringing the play to Lighthouse in Poole next week, this time as Billy’s mum.

She said: “I do feel like I have gone full circle.

“At the end of the film, you know that Billy will not go to London, but will stay at home and marry Barbara who will simply take over the role of his mother.

“That’s how I look at it.

"Being in the play, I have made the mother more important and she becomes the focal point.”

Helen said that while she loved being in the film, she adores doing the stage play because it “sorts the men from the boys” and means the cast has to think on their feet.

“If you forget your lines, you can’t just shout ‘cut!’ and do the scene again. You have to work with it and help each other out.”

Helen has made countless theatre, film and television appearances and has recently been seen playing formidable prison officer Sylvia ‘Bodybag’ Hollamby in ITV’s Bad Girls, a hugely popular series set in a women’s prison.

Her career has included everything from the National Theatre to pantomime, and she was in the Christmas Special of The Royle Family playing Tom Courtenay’s wife – reuniting them for the first time since they appeared together in the film version of Billy Liar.

But it is her role in Bad Girls that seems to have won her the most kudos.

“The first series was extremely tough and raw and they were frightened I would turn it down,” she said. “But it was also so popular and I became a gay icon. I was asked to judge Mr Gay UK and there were all these young men trying to handcuff themselves to me.

“Now they want to do Bad Girls the Musical! I have always wanted to be on the stage and this is a dream. They discovered that I can dance and I will also need to sing, but they couldn’t believe their luck!”

Billy Liar is at Lighthouse in Poole from Wednesday to Saturday, May 27 to 30.