WHEN Maxine Peake was a little girl growing up in Bolton, she didn't spend her time playing with dolls and dreaming of being a princess.

"I was always more of a Buttons, I think," she remembers, with a grin.

"I was a tomboy, but a misguided tomboy. I was really soft.

"I couldn't climb trees."

So it comes of something of surprise that the actress with the boyish bob and fondness for jeans and Birkenstocks - who has relatives living in East Lancashire - should be playing belle of the ball Cinderella in a new one-off comedy-drama for BBC One.

But this is no ordinary version of the fairytale.

It's the second of the Beeb's series of updates, which sees the famous fable transferred to a modern day university, with Maxine playing Cindy Mellor, a cleaner in the paleoanthropology department.

"IT'S basically the outline of the fairytale we know," says Maxine Peake in her thick, throaty accent.

The actress is discussing her latest TV role as Cindy Mellor, in an updated version of the Cinderella story.

"A girl down on her luck meets a charming young man and they live happily ever after. Only it's set in the world of academia and I play a cleaner who's obsessed with paleoanthropology. And she meets James Nesbitt's character, Professor H. Mike Prince, who is the authority on the subject, although she's not convinced by his theories."

Throw in some not especially ugly sisters, a godmother figure and a pumpkin (kind of) and you've got a mash up of Cinderella, Good Will Hunting and Educating Rita.

"I auditioned for one of the ugly sisters," reveals the 33-year-old actress. "I didn't hear anything and I was actually at the Baftas and bumped into Jimmy Nesbitt, who I'd never met before. He said, 'You're playing Cinderella' and I thought, 'Oh, he's had a lot to drink!' "I told him I'd auditioned and hadn't heard anything, so I didn't think I'd got it. And he said, 'Well, I heard you were playing Cinderella.' I thought if they're mad enough to cast me as Cinderella, I'm not going to turn it down."

In fact, Maxine's sly beauty and no-nonsense charm make her the perfect wannabe princess, though the former Dinnerladies star had to spend most of her time in yet another unflattering outfit.

"It was a tabard, but I've done tabards before," she laughs. In fact, it sounds like tabards are her outfit of choice, because just like the hospital cleaner she played to acclaim in Shameless, Maxine is something of a real life charlady.

"I love cleaning," she says. "I've got an addiction to bleach as well. It's a bit of a joke among my friends who say, 'You stink of bleach!' "I think that's how I relax. I think, brilliant, got a day off, get my Marigolds on and you know . . . I think if I ever became rich and could afford a maid, I'd have to clean before she came in.

"There were times in Shameless, because it filmed in a giant warehouse, we used to come in in the morning and I'd say, 'Come on, let me get the Hoover out'," she continues. "I was desperate to get the dusters out and give it a going over before we started filming."

Rubber gloves and a smock may not be the outfit of choice for most actresses, but for down-to-earth Maxine, it's that any day over getting dolled up in a posh frock.

"Ooh, I hate it," she admits. "I always feel like a man in drag. It's nice to dress up, but I'm one of those who says, 'Yeah, done it now, can I go and stick my jeans on and enjoy myself?' The shoes are lost somewhere, the handbag's somewhere else . . ."

It's an attitude that has stayed with her since her youth as a self-confessed "chunky kid" (who even spent some time playing in the Wigan Ladies' amateur rugby league) and back then, served her badly when it came to playing kiss chase.

"I always think I must have had been misadvised somehow about attracting the opposite sex," she laughs.

"I thought if you dress like them and hang around with them . . . I did lots of that to get boyfriends and, obviously, I had lots of male friends who thought I was GREAT and told me about all the girls they really fancied, like my best friend."

She's currently single, but has admitted that she only got her first boyfriend at the age of 23 and soon after joined WeightWatchers, on the advice of mentor Victoria Wood, where she dropped from 15 stone to her now svelte form.

"It's back to auditioning now," she grimaces when the question of her future comes up. Despite her talent and success, she seems to think that she still has to prove something to casting agents. "Constantly," she says when asked how often she blows screen tests, adding: "I'm getting worse at it as I get older. I get up and move about and they can't hear me over the noise of my script."