IT'S not often you meet an actor who can't read properly and has a speech impediment but then Paul James Corrigan is out of the ordinary.

A raw, natural talent who's now starring in acclaimed play Black Watch, Paul, 24, had never even been in a theatre until he went to drama college.

And growing up in North Lanarkshire is a million miles away from Luvvieland, especially for a man who has never read a book in his life.

But Paul completely re-wrote the script that life had prepared for him with his career choice.

"I struggled at school," he says. "My reading was just so bad. Now, I don't know if I'm dyslexic - I've never been tested - but I know the best I've done in reading was get to Page 18 of One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest. But it was too hard."

Paul wasn't bullied at his school, Cardinal Newman in Bellshill, although he was sometimes the butt of cruel jokes.

"The older ones would call me stutter bucket' and other names but I just said: What else is new?' I didn't let it affect me."

But he still didn't have much of a future.

On leaving school he worked in Safeway on the tills. He hated it but the real ignominy came from having an ex-girlfriend as his supervisor.

"She never took her beady eyes off me," he says, with a wry grin.

And there was worse to come at the age of 17.

"I worked in a cake factory," he recalls. "My job involved standing there all day long at the assembly line cutting icing off cakes. And while this may sound OK, in reality it was mind-numbing - I hated it with a passion.

You couldn't move from this assembly line - you had to put your hand up to go to the toilet - and I was always stinking of cake mix.

"But I needed to work. I had no choice."

Until one day, a voice sounded in Paul's head. Not out of nowhere, but from the other side of the line.

"This pal said to me, you shouldnae be here, man. You really like all that acting stuff, don't you? You love films. There's this acting course going on at Coatbridge College, you should be in that'."

Paul was excited by what he heard. Yes, why not. It sounded fun. And so his pal got him an application form.

"A wee while later I was working on the cake line when I felt my phone vibrate in my pocket. It was the drama course senior lecturer who had called to tell me I had an audition that afternoon.

"But I replied I couldn't make it. I was working. And she hung up."

Something told Paul that this was a life-changing moment.

"I thought, to hell with this', stuck my hand up and asked my supervisor if I could go to the toilet. Grudgingly, he said yes and told me to go and hurry up."

Paul went to the toilet, took off his overalls and never put them back on again.

He walked out of the factory and all the way to Coatbridge - "stinking of jam and cake."

But when he walked into the audition room there was a surprise in store. He was asked to read his prepared piece. He was clueless.

"They asked me, do you have a monologue?' Well, I didn't know what a monologue was."

And he couldn't read one even if he did.

"So the lecturer said to me, Look, Paul, think of a movie you like, take half an hour and try and play out a scene from that'. And that sort of made sense to me. Now, I'd loved the Brad Pitt movie Twelve Monkeys, seen it loads of time, and I knew one scene off by heart.

"So I went back in, recreated the scene and for the next couple of hours, they had me repeating this in a variety of ways; standing up on a chair, faster, slower, all ways.

"And I didn't stutter at all. I was confident in what I was doing. In fact, I really loved the experience. I wanted more of it."

Paul was to get it. His performance won him a place.

"They then told me to go see a play, at the Tron. I had never seen a play in my life and when I did I was blown away."

But there were problems when he went home. Paul's mum and her partner were less than pleased he'd walked out of a secure job so Paul decided to up sticks and live with his dad.

"I told him about the acting idea and he opened a can of beer for me. Sorted."

The hopeful young actor loved the drama course, but daftness - and immaturity - kicked in and he messed about in the first year. Even though he was landing the top parts in college productions, he was thrown out by course leader Josephine.

"I was gutted," he recalls. "I couldn't believe it. But they saw me as lazy and unreliable - and I was. I'd blown the real chance.

"Thinking about it now makes me cringe. I was so badly behaved."

During that summer of 2002, Paul was in a desperate state. Lost and miserable, he didn't even sign on the dole because he felt worthless.

But then fate intervened. When another student dropped out Paul was offered a second - and final - chance. He grabbed it and has never looked back. At the end of the course Paul walked into a variety of top theatre jobs - from the Borrowers to an acclaimed performance in Douglas Maxwell's Mancub - and fantastic reviews.

It wasn't a surprise the National Theatre of Scotland spotted his potential, first casting him in Wolves In the Walls and now Black Watch, where he plays Kenzie, a young Scots soldier innocent of the impending horrors of war in Iraq.

Paul's already toured America with the play and will also be performing at the SECC.

"I love it all," he says of acting. "I can get enough of it. I love my life."

And although he still can't read well, Paul has learned how to absorb passages and become word perfect by visualising himself in that scene. Turns out he has a photographic memory.

Once he hears something, or works his way through his lines he never forgets them.

And the stammer? There is little sign of it in conversation. It seems it faded as his confidence improved.

"No, I don't stutter anymore," he says, with real delight in his voice.

Seems his career won't either.