A burning ambition Actress Kathryn Howden grew up among the rough surroundings of Edinburgh's Pennywell, and she has used that experience well to toughen her for some brave roles on stage. By Neil Cooper

''They've all got good patter,'' Howden says of her onstage

sorority - Gabriel Quigley, Julie Duncanson, Jennifer Black, Wendy Seager and Gayanne Potter - over lunch during a break in rehearsals. ''They're really sharp, really witty, but mercurial, too. They can be

really nice one minute then turn really horrible the next. Just like any normal family,'' she adds.

Normal, however, isn't a word you could apply to Howden's real-life background, growing up in the capital's rough-and-tumble Pennywell district in what she looks back on as ''a topsy-turvy world'', where there were ''always odd people around''.

Neither did she feel particularly normal when she was nominated as Best Actress in 2002's Theatre Management Association awards for

her lead role in Howard Barker's

Victory, also at the Lyceum. Her

fellow nominees, after all, were the infinitely more pukka Diana Quick and Amanda Donohoe, both of whom had wowed London's west end as well as being starry presences on screens great and small.

It was a swanky Covent Garden do and, while she didn't win,

Victory remained a personal triumph for Howden. She'd been brave enough, after all, to take on a gruelling, non-glam role that showed off her full complex range. It was some distance from the knockabout stuff of Dario Fo's Can't Pay? Won't Pay that had started her career on the same stage.

''It was the first time I'd been given such a strong role,'' she says now of Victory. ''There was no looking for sympathy in the audience, and that was a great feeling.''

Victory was also the first time she'd acted onstage opposite her partner of six years, Gilly Gilchrist, since the pair met on the set of gritty gangland TV drama, Looking After Jo Jo.

Howden's fully rounded abilities were borne out the following year both in Peter Arnott's The Breathing House, director Kenny Ireland's final show at the Lyceum, and The Tron's revival of Chris Hannan's Shining Souls.

The roots of her guileless determination date back to Howden's Pennywell girlhood. Then it was usual for the shy middle child of three, who didn't sleep well, to be waiting up until four in the morning for her dad to come home. The dad in question was colourful club comic Alec ''Happy'' Howden, and top light entertainment was the order of both day and night.

Not every child, after all, can recall thinking nothing was untoward about watching her long-haired old man standing at the ironing board wearing nothing but his underpants and rollers in his hair. The image is made even more surreal by the fact that, grim-faced with concentration, he was smoothing out that night's gambling money. Meanwhile, mum would be up a ladder, wallpapering the room.

Then there was the time he was a part-time bus driver and would stop mid-route in Newhaven, leaving his passengers to chew the fat, while he slotted in a 20-minute spot at the local social club.

''When I was younger,'' Howden says, ''my dad was always the exciting one, always the life and soul of parties, but looking back now you can see it was my mum a lot of the time who pulled things together.''

With such a guddle of (de)stabilising influences, young Kathryn drifted into the chorus line at Edinburgh Youth Theatre, where big brother Lewis, now an accomplished actor, held court. Such posh-kid pursuits were hardly the done thing back in Pennywell, but somehow both got away with it. Just.

''It was a pretty rough area,'' says Howden, whose younger sister recently went to a reunion in the old neighbourhood, only to learn that seven people in her class had died as a result of heroin abuse.

''Growing up with something that's slightly different anyway, it exposes you to other things,'' Howden admits, ''but you still had to fight.'' As a young man, Pa Howden had worked as a boxer. Kath consequently ''fought like a boy, and no-one dared touch me''. She can't help but wonder what life would've been like if she hadn't had that inbuilt street sense to protect her.

It took five years before Howden got into drama school. The powers that be, she suspects, didn't know what to do with her. ''I wasn't

pretty enough for romantic leads,'' she reflects, ''and they couldn't figure out what sort of actress I was.''

When she toured the world with the all-female cast of Sue Glover's Bondagers, her role as the play's pivotal daftie character might have defined her forever, but the Edinburgh Fringe show's last night party at the Traverse changed all that. Unbeknown to Howden, who was sober and bunged up with cold, but letting off steam anyway, dancing in her own world beneath a spotlight, she was being watched.

Godfrey Hamilton was in Edinburgh with a show he'd written

for actor Mark Pinkosh and their company, Starving Artists. Pinkosh, too, was cutting loose after a hectic

festival, and, at the opposite end

of the room to Howden, was

equally abandoned. He, too, had found his light.

That image became the opening of Viper's Opium, which Hamilton wrote for Howden and Pinkosh, who performed it the following

year. Following Bondagers, Viper's Opium became what Howden regards as her second most important role, in which, while she may not mention it, she proved she could be sexy. With Victory completing her trio of personal bests, it's not a bad track record.

Howden is far from finished yet, however, and relishes hitting an age where meatier roles are within her grasp. She fancies having a crack at Lady Macbeth, ''but in a really sexy production, where that passion and that desire becomes the driving force of the whole play. I've not seen one like that. Not yet, anyway.''

All that vaulting ambition required for Lady M might not

necessarily be a good thing for

Howden, however. She feels that, as an actress, she's not ambitious enough, though worries what would happen to her if she were. She's witnessed the tantrums of those in the frontline whose hunger for fame was everything, and she doesn't fancy it much. For all her power on stage, calm and still as it remains, and for all her easy exterior off it, Howden is still in touch with the shy Pennywell girl she used to be. She's grateful for it, too.

''I get really emotional sometimes,'' she readily admits, ''because I'm doing what I want to be doing, and what I've always wanted to do. If anyone comes up to me and says they want to be an actress, I'll try to help them out in the way that other people helped me out and gave me that gift.''

She would never charge for it, mind. ''It'd spoil the magic of it, and that's what it is. It's a joy to be doing what I'm doing.

''It feels,'' and she pauses, ''well, it almost feels like you're in a family.''

Six Black Candles is at the

Royal Lyceum Theatre,

Edinburgh, until April 3.