By DOREEN CROWTHER Showbusiness Correspondent ACTRESS Sian Phillips is used to people saying she plays characters she resembles. "They told me that when I played Elizabeth I and other roles. But it's the wigs really. I looked nothing like Mrs Simpson who married the Duke of Windsor, but when I put on a severe black wig I did". I met Sian during a break in rehearsals for Marlene, a show about Marlene Dietrich which has its world premiere at the Oldham Coliseum next month before its West End opening.

Sian was explaining that people had been saying for years she looked and sounded like Marlene. They were right. Even without a wig she does.

Married to actor Peter O'Toole for many years, Sian has played many leading roles in stage film and television. Recent credits includeZMadame ArmfeldtZinZA Little Night MusicZand Mrs Birling inZAn Inspector CallsZat the Royale Theatre, New York. She was the Narrator forZA Flick Of A Switch,Za celebration of 100 years of cinema for the BBC.

The Marlene part was first mentioned in 1981 when she was playing in a production ofZPal Joey,Zher first musical.

Pam Gems, the author of Piaf! has written Marlene which will include the recreation of Dietrich's concert performance in which she sangZYou Do Something to Me, See What the Boys in the Back Room Will Have, You Go To My Head, Where Have All the Flowers GoneZ and the evocativeZFalling In Love Again.

"I listen to Marlene's records all the time," Sian told me. "We are trying to reproduce the sound exactly."

Sian saw Marlene in concert at Wimbledon. "Then we watched her outside with the fans and she was still obviously performing. I don't think she would have stopped until she closed her bedroom door behind her."

The elegantly slim Sian admits to being "a terrible nibbler" and admitted she has had to shed a stone in weight to wear a hand-beaded replica of Marlene's stage gown and feathered coat.

The theatre are staging the show in association with Michael Rose Limited and Michael Redington and the Coliseum's Chief Executive Kenneth Alan Taylor was at pains to point out that it was not the theatre which have paid for the outfits. The estimated cost of the two is around £48,000.

"We could not have afforded that ." he said.

Sian said: "We are quite nervous about this production because it has been so long in the preparation. But I think the Coliseum is the ideal place for it. It needs to be in an intimate theatre."

The show is set in Paris and shows the unglamorous side of theatre, backstage before the concert.

"Marlene was a remarkable woman who performed until she was 80 years of age," Sian said. "She was a very brave woman who made her own rules and reinvented herself."

Sian's approach to the production is to think of Marlene as "a character on a page".

"This is a work of the imagination," she said. "We don't know exactly how Marlene though. You just hope you have guessed right."

Unlike many actresses, Sian does not bemoan the lack of good roles for mature women.

"There comes a point where you may have to play someone's mother," she said. "But there are some wonderful roles."

Marlene sounds like one of them.

Marlene runs at the Oldham Coliseum from October 2 to 26.

Converted for the new archive on 14 July 2000. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.