WHEN Maureen Beattie was a young drama student, someone in a position of power made a comment that deeply troubled her. “That person suggested to me,” she recalls, “that although my work was good as an actor, it lacked depth and I was never going to be quite that good and the reason was because I was still a virgin.”

It doesn’t take much, she adds, “to extrapolate that he was offering to help me with this terrible problem of mine.”

Now 64 and one of Scotland’s finest actors – a familiar face from Casualty, The Bill, Outlander and even a Doctor Who Christmas special, with an astonishing body of theatre work to her credit – she realises that what she experienced back then was sexual harassment. But at the time, she was so horrified that she was unable to talk to anyone about it. For 20 years she told no-one: not even her showbusiness parents, model Kitty Lamont and Variety entertainer, Johnny Beattie.

“It never even dawned on me to tell somebody. I didn’t speak to anybody else on the staff. I didn’t tell my fellow students. I didn’t speak to my parents. Partly I think it was because I felt I was guilty that I’d allowed this terrible thing to occur. What happens in a situation like that is you take that thing and put it somewhere inside yourself and you draw the metal grid over it and it lies there quietly festering.”

The man’s suggestion even impacted on the way she saw herself as an actor. “What he said troubled me deeply. I’d worked very hard as a student, I was about to launch myself on the world and try to make a living and I went out into that with this feeling I’d somehow failed.”

This is one of the stories that Beattie shares by way of explaining why, as vice-president of actors’ union Equity, she is putting her considerable personal energies and fury behind an investigation into sexual harassment, which she hopes will lead to the creation of systems to help those who wish to speak out, and deter those who might harass or abuse. Beattie has been appalled by recent revelations from within showbusiness, the snowball of stories that began with the horrifying allegations around Harvey Weinstein, then spread out to reveal, across society, a culture of all too common harassment, manipulation, assault and abuse. It is, she says, “in

the marrow of our business”.

The issue affects men as well as women. “This is not a female only problem,” she says. “I’ve been speaking to friends in the gay community, people in the ethnic minority communities, women of all ages. ”

There has been a lot of talk about whether such behaviours were actually open secrets. Harvey Weinstein’s alleged conduct was described thus by some. But also, following allegations by Anthony Rapp, that Kevin Spacey had made advances on him when he was just 14, a series of sexual misconduct allegations have emerged around Spacey’s behaviour with young men in the UK, while he was artistic director at the Old Vic between 2003 and 2014. The Old Vic has set up a confidential complaints process for people involved with the theatre. Had Beattie heard stories about Spacey’s behaviour? “There had been gossip,” she says. “And I would like you to use that word. Because it’s very important that we remember, if we are to make a change occur we have to be very, very careful what we say and we have to be very, very careful of our facts. People tell tales, Chinese whispers start to happen. And sometimes they turn out to have absolute facts behind them, and sometimes they don’t. That’s what I would say about that. Gossip.”

She is firm on this. “It’s absolutely essential that we go through the proper processes, because what can happen at its very worst is that gossip can get out of hand. People put their own little curlicues on stories and start to embellish. It’s what we do as human beings and it can put the kibosh on taking people to task and actually bringing people to a point where they are punished, found guilty for what has been done. Because they can come back with counter claims. These powerful people know how to play the game. So we must be very careful.”

What’s crucial is not just that people’s stories are heard, but that systems are put in place to help victims report, and also deter abusers. “We need to move really fast on this,” she says, “strike while the iron is hot, harness this energy of all this stuff that’s coming out.”

One question frequently asked around some of these high-profile allegations is – who else knew and why wasn’t it reported? But Beattie understands why people are often silent. She recalls an encounter with a young stage manager, which took place many years ago while she was working on a production in England. “I remember standing in the stage wings one night beside her, a lovely young girl not long out of college, and she was ashen. She handed me this piece of paper – a note one of the older men in the company had handed to her. I

won’t tell you what it said, but it was awful. It drained the blood from my

face. Really invasive, sexual. I just didn’t know what to do. I tried to comfort her. I said, ‘I know about this now. I’ll try to keep an eye on you.’”

Beattie, however, did nothing about it. “And it’s still on my mind to this day. I never did anything because I thought – I’ve got to go on working with this guy. I’ve got to go on pretending everything is fine on stage.” Now, she says, she would like to think she would act. “I would feel no compunction at all.”

Have attitudes in the industry changed? Having grown up the eldest of four siblings in a showbusiness family, and worked her way up through repertory companies and major TV series, Beattie is in a good position to talk about what it means to be a woman in her profession, and whether attitudes have moved on.

“I’ve talked to my contemporaries about harassment and what we recall is that it was absolutely something you accepted as just par for the course. Sexist comments about what you looked like, whether you were sexy or attractive, inappropriate touching. It’s been

allowed to take root and grow for so many decades.”

She speculates that today, harassment is done much less overtly than it was back then. “It’s no longer acceptable to behave in such an obvious way as it was when I was at drama school. It’s gone more underground.”

Back in her early working years, if she reacted against men’s “banter” she’d be told to loosen up or asked: “Don’t you like men?”

“Of course,” adds Beattie, “people don’t speak to strong women or men like that. Their victims are always the innocent, the young, the unsure. So these things were said to me when I was much younger and much less sure of myself. But my answer now, if someone asked me if I didn’t like men, would be – ‘No, I do like men. I just don’t like you’.”

Beattie’s mother, Kitty Lamont, was one of Scotland’s most successful models and ran a modelling agency. Did she tell any tales of working in the business? “My mother was absolutely drop-dead gorgeous,” she says. “And she worked

in an industry that was all about what you looked like and making yourself

as attractive as possible in the most obvious way. God knows what it was like in that world. But my mother never talked about it.”

Lamont died of cancer in 1993, so there’s no opportunity now to quiz her about her experiences. However, Beattie’s father, Johnny, is still going strong and has just celebrated his 91st birthday. Beattie plans on heading to Scotland this weekend to visit him. (She lives in Battersea, London, but still keeps a house in Scotland on the Isle of Bute.) “I’m hoping to have a good old natter with him about it. Because, well, the wisdom of the ages. He’s seen huge changes in the way that everything works because he started in the business in 1953.”

Her father, she says, is enormously proud of what she’s doing with Equity. In fact, it’s not hard to see why Maureen Beattie might have taken to her union work with such gusto, when one learns about his early years as an apprentice electrician on the Clyde shipyards. “He says himself that there was a point in his early career when he could have gone either into showbusiness or become a trade unionist. He was very active in the trade union movement. Great public speaker, a very bright man: witty.”

Even when he opted for showbusiness, Johnny Beattie maintained his belief in unions, and became involved in the Variety Artists Federation, which would later fuse with Equity. “My dad went and stood on street corners and went to stage doors and said, ‘Please will you join, it’s the only chance we’ve got: activism.’”

Has she always been so driven on this subject? “I’ve always got very angry about injustice when I see it. It makes me very, very angry. But my activism with Equity really came to a head about four or five years ago. People had said to me over the years, you’re always banging on about Equity, why don’t you get properly involved?”

Today, Beattie is of an age when there are said to be fewer roles for women, yet she seems as busy as ever. The months ahead are blocked out with performances of two plays that have been among the biggest theatrical hits in recent years: The Ferryman, directed by Sam Mendes, and Yerma, starring Billie Piper, which tours to New York. She describes herself as “unbelievably lucky to still be putting bread on the table through my acting work”. After all, she observes: “I have female friends of my age who are so talented, [yet] do not work from one year’s end to the next.”

“Regardless of age,” she adds, “there’s less work for women generally. Most Shakespeare plays have 13 men and one woman, or 13 men and two or three women. Three women is really good.” Earlier this year, Beattie performed in one of these plays at the Lyceum, A Winter’s Tale, in which there are three such strong female characters. As vice-president of Equity, she is keen to support a wave of new organisations and campaigns which are attempting to redress this balance.

Beattie hasn’t had children. “I was never particularly maternal,” she says. “I’m not somebody who longed to

have children of my own.” Has that enabled her have a more successful career? “I don’t know. Because look at my mum and dad, both had fantastic careers and managed to bring up four kids.”

She seems relaxed about the march of time across her face and body. “That may be to do with the fact that I can’t see myself quite so clearly so I don’t see the ravages of time,” she quips, before adding that she’s “personally not all that bothered by how I look”.

Beattie hasn’t always been so untroubled by her body image. She recalls feeling guilty about her weight when she was young, which she thinks may be linked to the way society makes women feel bad about themselves. “I think it’s all to do with being made to feel unworthy. I felt guilty about being overweight at drama school. That’s ridiculous. But when I looked in the mirror I saw a great big fat blob because that was how I was made to feel by the world.”

Did growing up surrounded by her mother’s agency’s models also have an impact? Kitty Lamont employed the teenaged Maureen Beattie and her friends to help dress the models backstage at fashion shows. “It might well have been a factor,” she considers. “I have sometimes thought being surrounded by people who looked like that might not have helped.”

What, then, would be her advice, given all the recent revelations, to a young woman entering the business today? Her reply is breathtakingly practical. “Number one: Join Equity,” she says. “Seriously. We are the front line of your defence. Join Equity and if something awful happens you can come to us. You can come and meet the person, organiser, text them, email, all done with complete confidentiality. Then each step of the way if you want to take it further that’s great, if you don’t it stops – entirely up to you. But if you want to take it to court then Equity will back you every inch of the way. We’ve got your back.”

Number two? “Do not be afraid. These people are not right. Don’t feel guilty. You are the one in the right. Not them. Absolutely do not keep it quiet. Tell someone. Because as soon as you get it out there it ceases to be a nasty secret.” That’s said by one whose tale of harassment may not be as shocking as some, but who knows what it is to bury a secret and have it fester.