SHEENA Easton has coaxed a range of emotions out of Scotland’s collective face since she made it onto television in 1979.

We were delighted for the girl from Bellshill when she landed the BBC’s The Big Time.

And we were pleased when Sheena Shirley Orr, as she was, found international success.

But of course we took the huff when she came back to perform at Glasgow Green in 1990, bringing with her a Debbie Reynolds accent.

Yet, what does the lady herself make of the journey?

We’re in a quiet corner of the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane in the heart of London’s West End where Sheena is set to star in musical theatre classic, 42nd Street.

The singer, who will turn 58 next month, is wearing a black trouser ensemble and her hair hints at aubergine.

She looks great and if she has had any work done by her fourth (“and last”) husband, a plastic surgeon, you can’t tell.

Sheena seems a little wary but that’s understandable. The lady has been burned more times than the lead actress in a touring production of Saint Joan.

So let’s start easy. How does she feel about her making her West End debut as Dorothy Brock, the Broadway diva, who struggles with a young female singer’s success?

“This show is hard core, but it’s not that I haven’t been performing,” she offers. “If I’m not appearing with my band I’m out doing symphonies, a couple of times a month at least.”

But there is more to learn in a musical theatre show. “Yes, but I came in knowing the book and all the songs,” she says. “It’s preparation. It’s part of my ethic when I take on a job.”

Sheena Easton’s North Lanarkshire upbringing, as one of six children, ruled out her becoming a real-life Dorothy Brock.

“There was certainly no Get Out of Jail Free Card in life handed out,” she explains.

“My father dying when I was 10, and being ill for a couple of years before that, prepared me for anything. Then my mum had to leave home at 5am to work in a factory. I learned how to set the alarm clock, get myself up for school, do my homework when I got home, have the potatoes peeled. And tidy the house.”

She says: “There was no concept of choice. Things had to be done. And that’s how I approached the rest of my life.”

In her final year at the RSAMD, the BBC came calling with the Big Time. Yet it was demanding. Sheena was set up like a fairground coconut to be knocked down by critics.

“Yes, but you have to bear in mind I was at drama school for three years, where every day directors would pull you apart, to make you improve. They would tell you when you were horrible.

“So when I made the Big Time I was used to criticism.”

To the outsider, there was more chance of Stanley Baxter becoming Bond than Easton becoming the next Bassey and landing the Bond song. How in the name of Miss Moneypenny did she pull that one off?

“I think it’s truly a case of the harder you work the luckier you get. I’d wake up sometimes and have no idea what day of the week it was. I remember once having to look at the pad next to the phone on the bedside table, to see what language it was in so I could to work out which country I was in.

“But I never thought to complain and say, ‘I haven’t had a day off in six months and I don’t want to go to Belgium tomorrow’.”

Sheena admits to being a little affected by success. She bought a gorgeous Jaguar convertible – then realised she hated her hair being blown everywhere. “I thought ‘Why did I by a fricking convertible when you can only drive it with the top down?’” (She now drives a Prius.)

But if the lady was driven to succeed, in her thirties she hit the brakes, to “have a normal life” and despite being single (strikeouts on two marriages) adopted a boy and a girl.

She stepped out of the spotlight and into a modest home in Nevada, having worked for years in Vegas.

“There’s never a sweet spot,” she says of finding the right work/life balance. “Sometimes you work non-stop from January to July, then you have three months off and you want to shoot yourself in the face.”

Sheena came back to Glasgow in 1990, for the Big Day concert. But the crowd didn’t like her El Paso accent at all.

“I’ve often been told my accent was horrendous,” she says, grinning “And to this day, it changes. I guess I have one of those ears that picks up on accents. But what I won’t do, for example, if I’m coming back to Britain, is to think, ‘I’d better brush up on my Scots.’ If I do that I tend to sound like Shrek’s mother.”

She avoids reading about herself.

“But sometimes I pee myself laughing when friends tell me I really need to look at a piece written about me, like the time a headline suggested I was ‘Deathly’, when pictured in a wheelchair. It made me look like I was coming out of rehab.”

In reality, she was coming out of the dentist. The wheelchair was an insurance safeguard.

Much was written about her relationship with Prince, with whom she had hits such as U Got The Look.

“In those first few hours when we first met he poked fun at me, and being Scottish I loved the sarcasm. If you like someone you can be sarcastic towards them from the get go.”

She adds; “I hadn’t seen him much in the last years. I can’t picture him being gone. And I can’t imagine how much pain he was in physically and emotionally for him to do what he did. But he was also incredibly spiritual, a great amalgam of so many things rolled into one.”

Now that the children are grown up Sheena is freed up to take on the West End. But what of relationships? The longest of her four marriages was 18 months.

“I’ll never get married again,” she says, emphatically. “You see, whenever I know something about myself I can’t unknow it.”

What does she know? “I’d start to think I was the common denominator in all of these relationships, so I was choosing people that there is no way in hell I was going to last with.

“I realised I don’t want to be in a permanent state. I feel hemmed in when I’m in a relationship. All of sudden people assume you’re a couple and I hate the feeling when they say, ‘Why don’t you bring so and so with you?’ And I say ‘What can’t I just bring myself?’ I’m not a two, I’m a one.”

The lady is on a roll. “I hate the expression ‘The other half.’ I’m not a half of anything. The only joining I’ve really made through choice is with my kids. I feel most at home, most comfortable being a mom.”

But there must be a romantic side to her, the optimist who has seen a ring placed on the third finger four times?

“Yes, that’s why I’ve been married so often,” she says with a wry grin. “I kinda do everything one hundred per cent or not at all.”

• 42nd Street, from April 4, The Theatre Royal, Drury Lane.