Elaine C Smith has unveiled a new prize to support and celebrate new female voices in comedy.

The Two Doors Down star and the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland will give £500 annually for the next 10 years to a final-year drama student across RCS’s BA Acting, BA Performance and BA Musical Theatre degree programmes at the end of the academic year.

She hopes the prize helps to empower women in comedy, particularly those from working-class backgrounds like her own while offering financial support during challenging times for the creative arts industry.

She said: "Making people laugh is such a joyous thing.

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"In my time, comedy in many ways was seen as lesser. Everyone wanted to do the serious roles. And invariably, what I’ve found in my career is that people who can do comedy well can also do tragedy very well. It's all about timing.

"Comedy touches people and, as the great Joni Mitchell says, laughing and crying, are the same release. There’s a real skill in comedy that’s innate.

"The prize is me wanting to leave a trail of sweeties, saying to women, ‘here’s a route, come on’.

“In a time like this, when the creative arts are under attack, it’s a wee bit of money to help them along the way, to buy the books they need or to afford to go and see a few shows.

(Image: BBC)

“Even though I had a grant, I was working in clubs and bars and waitressing all the way through my studies and living week to week. Hopefully the students – even if they don’t have a clue who I am – will think ‘well, if she did it, so can I.”

The actress who was born in Baillieston in Glasgow and grew up in Newarthill, North Lanarkshire, joined RSAMD at seventeen: “I remember coming in on the bus for my audition wearing a three-piece trouser suit and platforms with Farrah Fawcett flicks in my hair and sitting with girls in leotards and tights and hair in buns. I was completely unprepared and felt out of my depth. But they thought I had a talent, and I got in.”

 

Her love of the arts was sparked at school: “When you could perform and sing you got attention … and I was a show-off,” she laughed.

“It was also watching people like Doris Day and Lucille Ball and seeing women being funny – it opened my eyes. I wanted to be Calamity Jane and I loved Lucille Ball in I Love Lucy, and then finding out that she was the first woman to set up her own production company in Hollywood.

 

“It was also seeing what comedy did to my parents – how they laughed at Morecambe and Wise and Billy Connolly. Billy was a really big influence – especially hearing your own accent and culture, particularly when he was on talk shows like Parkinson.”

She is passionate about access to the arts and after graduating from RSAMD and completing a teacher training course, she worked as a drama teacher in a school in Edinburgh for three years.

“When I was a teacher, I took my kids to see stuff all the time and to make them realise that they shouldn’t be intimidated walking into a theatre. The theatre was theirs.

“Pantomime, and one of the reasons I keep doing it, is because it’s a gateway into the theatre. It might be the only time people go and the first time kids see an orchestra, live band or dancers.

“I grew up believing that art belonged to other people, and posher people than me. The notion of art was defined by the middle to upper classes. But art belongs to everyone.”

As well as playing Christine O'Neil in the BBC Scotland sitcom Two Doors Down, Ms Smith is known for appearing in City Lights and Rab C Nesbitt.

She was awarded the honorary degree of Doctor of the University by the University of Glasgow in 2008, and is a high-profile advocate of Scottish independence.