By Brian Beacom

WENDI Peters proves to be more of a surprise than a Christmas present from a distant auntie.

The world knows her as Cilla Battersby, the Coronation Street scrounger and opportunist who brushed off her kids Chesney and Fizz as though they were light flakes of dandruff.

Wendi’s character, so successful that producers tried very hard to keep her beyond her four year stint, is however very far removed from the woman herself.

There’s almost nothing of her original Bolton accent, now substituted with a refined, articulate voice.

But it’s the voice which emerges when she’s on stage that really has you looking on incredulously.

The night before our chat presented an opportunity to see Wendi appear with a collection of top singers in Frank Wildehorn and Friends.

The show offered a collection of Wildehorn songs such as Off With Their Heads, a taster for Wildehorn’s new musical Wonderland.

Wonderland is described as “an enchanting musical adaptation of Lewis Carroll’s Alices Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass.”

Wendi, who is married to actor Kenny Linden, (their 16 year-old daughter Gracie is studying musical theatre) will star as the Queen of Hearts in the show. And it’s no real surprise.

While many actors can sing, few can more than hold their own with the very best musical theatre has to offer.

“It was a scary moment,” she says of the previous night, smiling.

“If someone had said to me at one stage I’d be singing on stage with a Broadway composer I’d have said ‘You’re kidding me on.’

“But in recent years I have worked on quite a few musicals. And it’s where my roots are. I love musicals as much as I loved playing roles such as Cilla in Coronation Street.”

Wendi brings a character performance to each song. And she can create comedy with a twist of a smile.

It’s no surprise to learn she has studied some of the legends of British film in her bid to develop her career.

The actress reveals the likes of Peggy Mount, Margaret Rutherford, Joyce Grenfell, Thora Hird and Dora Bryan helped her understand how to hint at comedic undercurrent.

Wendi was always determined to make it is a musical theatre star, but she reveals her initial attempts to enter drama college Arts-Ed as a 16 year-old, tested her resolve to the limit.

“My ballet teacher had been there and it was the school to go to,” she recalls. “I sang Everything’s Coming Up Roses from Gypsy and they told me I was fabulous.

“But then I got called before then headmistress and she basically told me, in no polite terms, as she sat eating chocolate digestive biscuits, that I should come back next year when I had lost a bit of weight.”

Wendi cried for two days. But then pulled herself together and applied to the London Studio Centre.

Her talent was recognised but Wendi was hit with a serious note of concern.

“I was told then I wouldn’t come into my own in the business until I was forty. I was different from the rest of the girls. I was slightly larger, more quirky. And I thought it was terrible thing to say to someone at that age.

“But in retrospect, the drama teacher was just about right. I went on to work in the business, I did lots of quirky teenage roles, but I didn’t get Corrie until I was thirty-five.”

She played the likes of Jan in Grease and the lead in Red Riding Hood, but then came the point Wendi too old to play the teenager, but too young to play the character mums.

Wendi decided to stop taking the smaller theatre roles, believing she was doomed to play them forever.

“I made a conscious decision not to go up for them and as a result I probably put myself out of work for two or three years.

“But I did all the other jobs in theatre. The followspotting (a lighting job) the dressing work, the whole thing and you learn so much from doing that and watching.

“And you realise how these people can make the show.” She adds, in knowing voice; “You also come across the actors who have no respect for anyone else and you know not to behave like that.”

Wendi hung on for the character roles she craved and they began to appear, such as ITV drama Bad Girls, in 2003.

“My daughter was about four months old when I filmed it and then there was two years of nothing. But I got to spend time with my daughter. And the week she went to nursery I landed Coronation Street.”

Wendi, currently in panto in Sheffield, playing an Ivana Trump-like character, was a huge success on the Street. Yet, she knew she had to move on.

“I loved it, and the people there, but four years was enough. I had already been persuaded to stay on longer, and had enough time to create a character.”

The character, all push-up bra and downtrodden expression, was an awful yet likeable woman. She may have conned and cheated but Wendi made she Cilla was always human, always vulnerable.

Wendi, almost fifty, may return to the Street. “Never say never. Always a chance.” But there’s no doubt Cilla has allowed Wendi to land bigger theatre roles.

And she hopes her Queen of Hearts will feature something of the Cilla, in that she’s a monster, but one with whom we have some sympathy.

“She says in one line ‘Off with their heads!’ and then adds, ‘I’m never all quite there.’ She’ll be funny, I hope. And just how not all quite there she is we’ll find out. “

Wendi loves her professional life. “You’ve sussed me. Concerts, voice-overs, panto, musicals, I love it all.

“And from the age of ten I knew this was the life for me. I was focused. I’d sit in my bedroom listening to musical theatre songs.”

She adds, laughing; “I didn’t go out much as a child. But I’m making up for it now.”

• Wonderland, the King’s Theatre, July 3-8.