Tamzin Outhwaite: If the cap fits...

In her search for demanding new roles, Tamzin Outhwaite has overcome the huge snobbery reserved for former TV soap stars. And, she tells James Rampton, she's only just begun

Equity warning: being in a soap can seriously damage the health of your future career. Many actors leave EastEnders or Coronation Street with big plans to headline in the National Theatre or the RSC, but end up forever typecast as "that geezer from Albert Square" and unable to land any role beyond the back of a pantomime cow.

Now, however, a new breed of ex-soap performer is bucking that trend. Such actors are parlaying sudsy stardom into a career of surprising versatility. Look at the success of, say, Sarah Lancashire. She quit serving behind the bar at the Rovers Return and in the past year alone has played characters as varied as a defiant leukaemia victim in Birthday Girl, a distraught woman who has lost her baby in The Cry, an intuitive lawyer in Rose and Maloney, and the feisty Gertrude in an adaptation of Sons and Lovers.

The latest actress to carve out a substantial post-soap CV is Tamzin Outhwaite. Since leaving EastEnders, where she played the card-carrying man-eater Mel, the actress has taken on a wide range of parts, none of which contains the slightest hint of a vamp born within the sound of Bow Bells. She parted company with the soap in April, saying: "I'm not sure what was left for Mel to do after she had been kidnapped, been married twice, burnt down a club and slept with her best friend's husband." Since then, Outhwaite has made a conscious effort to stay off characters with obvious Albert Square associations.

"I was worried at first that I would be typecast as Mel," she recalls. "I was reading stuff and thinking, 'This is just Mel in a different costume.' A couple of gangster's molls came up – which was what Mel was – so I wanted to avoid them. But now the scripts I'm being sent are so diverse, I'm not so concerned."

For a start, Outhwaite is portraying Jo, a no-nonsense military policewoman, in Red Cap, which begins as a series, after a successful pilot, on BBC1 next week. "What tempted me", she explains, "was that I'm a tomboy anyway, and the part allows me to explore that side of my character. Up until then, I'd been playing a character who is really quite glamorous, so taking on a different role was important to me. Jo is not too worried about what she looks like; she doesn't care about vanity. She was brought up with boys and is not very aware of her femininity. Jo is quite unlike Mel or anything else I've done."

The same applies to Outhwaite's next role. The Essex-born actress has just completed work on BBC1's Final Demand, a morally ambiguous drama by the novelist Deborah Moggach, in which she plays Natalie, a hard-up accounts clerk who commits a cunning fraud on her customers.

"I liked the fact that the character was edgy," she explains. "Natalie is not straight-down-the-line likeable. She could well be taken as a manipulative control freak. That's very realistic, because no one person is all good or all bad."

It was Out of Control, broadcast on BBC1 in the autumn, which really liberated Outhwaite from the soapy stereotype. In Dominic Savage's viscerally powerful movie, which won the Michael Powell award for best British film at the Edinburgh Festival this year, Outhwaite played Shelley, a poverty-stricken single mother whose easily led son was sent to a young offenders' institution. There, he was subjected to a horrific bullying campaign, which drove him to take his own life. You would have had to be made of stone to remain unmoved as Shelley wailed with inarticulate grief at the news.

Most impressive of all, this performance was entirely improvised. "When you improvise, it comes from pretty deep within you." A far cry, then, from one of Mel's highly staged catfights down the Queen Vic.

Added to that, Outhwaite proved that she was not just a pretty face by making herself virtually unrecognisable for Out of Control. She traded Mel's traffic-stopping blonde good looks and temptress's short skirts for scraped-back, dull brown hair, shellsuits and a pinched, chain-smoking demeanour. This jolting transformation was the equivalent of seeing Ena Sharples play a smouldering seductress.

Sitting in a London restaurant over breakfast, Outhwaite is restored to her more familiar soignée look in an elegant brown suede jacket. She says that for Out of Control "I had to be raw. It is not a glamorous role. I wore no make-up for it – and that was a joy. I'm used to being glammed up on screen, but it was lovely not to have to worry about that. It felt like a real release."

A likeable, hard-working performer, Outhwaite admits that she had to overcome various prejudices to secure the part. "There is a snobbery about former soap stars. The range of emotions used in a soap has always been underrated. The director of Out of Control took a risk with me because I could have been too recognisable. But we made a deliberate decision to give me a totally different look, and that did half the job for me."

Now the 32-year-old hopes this boldly exposing performance will help her to shed the dreaded tag of "ex-soap star" for good. "I'd like to be known just as a jobbing actress – which I was before I joined EastEnders in 1998," Outhwaite reflects. "Going completely against the grain and playing a character like Shelley makes people see you in a different light. Already, people in the street are calling me Tamzin rather than Mel. It's great because I was quite prepared to be called Mel for the rest of my life. The 'ex-Eastenders' label still happens in the press – and it will probably happen for ever. But I do feel my image is changing."

Out of Control has also altered the press's perception of the actress. Would she, for example, have featured on the pages of this newspaper a year ago? "I'd always been tabloid fodder," Outhwaite acknowledges. "I was happy with that – you just adapt to them in order to promote your programmes. But for the first time, with Out of Control, the broadsheets wrote about something I'd been in and, I'm glad to say, they were enthusiastic. You have to do a piece like that for the broadsheets to sit up and take notice, because EastEnders is not their bag."

Before I leave, there is one more image Outhwaite is keen to dispel – the "sex symbol" label with which the tabloids have saddled her. "We're so obsessed with pigeonholing, aren't we? Everyone wants to categorise you, put you in a little box. I don't mind the sex-bomb thing – of course it's flattering – but there is a lot more to me than that. That's why I'm enjoying the more gritty characters I'm playing at the moment. I know acting is hardly life-saving stuff, but if I can connect with even one person and make a difference, then it makes getting out of bed each morning much more meaningful, doesn't it?"

So what would her dream role be, then? "My ambition is to play Lady Macbeth. I find her descent into madness compelling, and I'd love the challenge of bringing that alive." Tamzin Outhwaite as Lady Macbeth? Now that would prove once and for all that there is life after soap.

'Red Cap' starts on BBC1 on 7 Jan at 9pm. 'Final Demand' will be broadcast on BBC1 later in the year