JANINE Birkett’s first professional appearance on stage was as a sheep; her second was as a horse. Not any old horse: she was Clover in a dramatisation of George Orwell’s Animal Farm.

Her animal days are long gone and Janine is now back at Keswick’s Theatre by the Lake to play a very human pub landlady. Plus, with the help of a swift change of accent, hat or cardigan, six other women in the same play, Jim Cartwright’s Two.

Running from Saturday, March 21, until April 14, she shares a fairly empty stage in Two with just one other actor (Matt Addis, who plays seven men); there’s a bar and a table or two but no beer pumps, bottles of spirits, glasses or packets of crisps. So, with the help of a mime specialist, Janine has been learning how to serve pretend gin and tonics.

“I’ve been pulling imaginary pints and discovered muscles I never knew I had,” she explained. “We’ve been encouraged to break down every action and found 33 separate movements in a moment where I have to pour a Babycham and two sweet white wines.”

Janine is a Geordie but has Cumbrian connections. Her father is a Birkett – a Cumbrian name - and that was also her mother’s maiden name; both sides of Janine’s family seem to be descended from her great-great-great grandparents, James Birkett of Kirkbampton and Dorothy Twentyman from Orton Rigg who married at St Giles’s Church in Great Orton in 1842.

“They had about eight children and at some point moved to Newcastle. Two of their sons established the two sides of my family. I went to Great Orton church and felt an instant connection with the place – I’ve found I really love Cumbria. Perhaps there’s something about the land that seeps down through the generations.”

Janine came to theatre late. As a child, she had made up plays for friends and at school she appeared briefly as a courtier in Cinderella. But she wasn’t stage struck and was never in the limelight at Newcastle Polytechnic, where she studied sociology before taking a post-graduate degree in race relations at Lancaster University.

After some community work, she went wandering round the world, during which she pondered her future and decided she would join an amateur dramatic society when she returned home. So she did. And that was it.

“My first time on stage was as the innkeeper’s wife in The Man of La Mancha in front of a thousand people at the Tyne Theatre in Newcastle. On the first night, I remember having one of those momentous thoughts when I said to myself, ‘I feel different now.’”

Many amateur shows followed and Janine turned professional in 1992. Within months she was working for the Northumberland Theatre Company (the sheep, plus a few people) and then Northern Stage (the horse). She made a living with the help of three series of Byker Grove and varied radio work.

In 1998, she won a part in a low-budget film to be made in the north east and set during the miners’ strike. She was to be the mother of an 11-year-old boy from a Durham pit village who was mad on ballet. His name - Billy Elliot. “I loved doing it. I went to London to see the première and cried my eyes out all the way through. And then the film became this massive thing, which I don’t think any of us had expected.”

The film didn't earn Janine a fortune: she did it for a flat fee so has received no royalties from a worldwide phenomenon that has so far grossed more than a hundred million dollars.

The film was released in 2000, by which time Janine had banded with a group of theatre friends to launch The Guild of Lillians, a company run by, and for, women and born out of frustration with male domination of the stage in the north east.

Her career has taken her to the New Vic in Newcastle-under-Lyme and to Alan Ayckbourn's Stephen Joseph Theatre in Scarborough, where her partner Chris Monks is artistic director. She has appeared in many television series and is also a regular recorder of audio books.

Janine came first to Theatre by the Lake in the 2002 summer season and returned for another in 2013 (during which she had to fry sprouts on stage in a play about Vincent Van Gogh); she has also been back for April in Paris, The Maid of Buttermere and The Railway Children.

“Before that first season, I think I had been to Keswick for only one day. When I came here to work, I was completely smitten. I also think the theatre is an amazing place to work – just to look out of the window and see all those fields and fells. For one of my first shows, I used to wander out into Crow Park and practise my South African accent with the sheep. Where else in the world could you do that?”

Two tours to small venues in Cumbria from April 16-25.