SHE'S been the ex-wife from hell who saw her two children die in a car crash, before being accidentally killed by her husband when he pushed her downstairs.

Karen Drury certainly ran through the whole gamut of emotions as Brookside's mercurial femme fatale Susannah Farnham, so it was something of a relief for the actress to turn from soapy histrionics to the repressed emotional landscape of 1930s Britain.

Yorkshire-born Karen is now starring in a stage adaptation of the classic 1945 film Brief Encounter, playing the Celia Johnson character Laura Jesson, whose doomed love affair with Trevor Howard's character Alec Harvey captured the hearts of generations of film-goers.

After nine years of life in the rarely-tranquil Brookside Close, Karen was glad to make a break from the Scouse soap.

She said: "Brookside was great fun and I had a wonderful time, but I'd had enough of it. It just didn't have the same appeal after a while.

"After hounding my ex-husband Max and worming my way back into his affections, the children died and I attempted suicide. Then I had a baby and Max had an affair and killed me. It all went a bit daft, but soaps do get daft."

Karen managed to inspire viewers to feel both hate and affection for her character during her time on Brookside.

She said: "The part of Susannah was written as a really horrible ex-wife. Perhaps to make it more interesting, I decided to play her very sweetly. She was very nice, but a terrible snob.

"Those little subtleties got a bit lost at the end, but I just had to adapt to it."

Far from being lost, it is the subtleties of her performance, together with the nuances of looks and conversation that will form the focus of Brief Encounter.

Karen said: "The hardest thing is conveying how deeply moved these characters are by what's happening.

"Noel Coward, who helped write the play, talked about people behaving beautifully - namely keeping their emotions hidden.

"Laura is a very nice woman, who believes she's happily married. She meets Alec and falls madly in love with him and finds it very, very confusing.

"I don't think she considers running away - she just knows it will never be."

Fans of the film will love the period detail that, Karen says, was so essential to the play's setting.

"I don't think it would work in another age. It's very much of it's time, from an age when people did the right thing.

"We tried to keep it very atmospheric, so we've used the film's Rachmaninov score and the sound of steam trains.

"We've got fantastic costumes and scenery and we studied the way people behaved with each other - for example, they never touched each other.

"We also talk with very clipped accents, although I don't go quite as clipped as Celia Johnson!"

Surprisingly, although the social taboos that thwarted a happy outcome for Brief Encounter's lovers have largely vanished, the new production had other social barriers to face in its quest for realism.

Karen said: "In those days you wouldn't dream of not offering someone a cigarette but, of course, that's very frowned on now."

In the future, Karen hopes her career will continue to fluctuate between the theatre and television, both of which have provided her with meaty parts.

"It's a job in which anything can happen," she said. After the number of Brookside plot-twists she's faced, Karen should know.

Brief Encounter will play at Preston's Charter Theatre from Tuesday June 3 to Saturday June 7. For tickets, call 01772 258858.