NINE in the morning, cup of something hot, no milk, a bite of a triangle of toast, and Linda Gray takes her seat in jeans and brown boots, her lips and eyes still as big as Texas at 66.

Yes, this is the Dallas star wholly at ease in her York hotel on day two of the Theatre Royal rehearsals - after a couple of weeks in the basement of the Hampstead Theatre in London - for the world premiere of Dan Gordon's stage version of Hollywood classic Terms Of Endearment from 1983.

She is to play feisty widow Aurora Greenway, in a role Gordon wrote with Linda in mind.

This is her first time in the city.

"I've never been here, but I've heard such resounding accolades, " Linda says, in an accent of Californian vintage rather than the Texan of drunken Sue Ellen, the TV soap role that brought her enduring fame over 11 series of Dallas.

"They've given me a beautiful brochure of York and I was so eager to get here to see what all my friends in London were raving about, and now we have the privilege of being here for five weeks."

In London's West End, Linda had appeared as Mrs Robinson in The Graduate in 2001 at 60, attracting all the usual fuss over the brief nude scene. "It was seven seconds out of two hours, " she says, reassured that I would not pursue the subject further.

"But I do remember a minute before curtain, I was standing by the stage the night that Larry Hagman (Dallas's JR) was in, and they said, 'Do you know, Larry Hagman is going to see you naked', and we'd known each other for 30 years! 'Why did you have to say that?', I said. And his seats were directly in front!"

Linda says she was treated fairly by the notorious British press when appearing in The Graduate, and she expects the same in Terms Of Endearment, a production that will open in York, then tour Britain ahead of a West End run.

"They treated me with care, I think, but I didn't dwell on it. I just think, 'I'm here to do a job, good, bad or indifferent. This is my career and people will like it or they won't'. It's a pretty simple philosophy, " Linda says.

"That's the philosophy I adapted many, many years ago, and it's a daily philosophy for me. You'll never please everybody. I gave that idea up a long time.

"I go out on stage each night and say, 'tonight I'm going to do it better' and even on the last night of The Graduate in London, I thought, 'oh, if only I could have one more night to do that better'.

"But I don't think, 'Aurora has to be better than Sue Ellen or Mrs Robinson'. I honestly don't go there."

Nevertheless, Dan Gordon was determined Linda Gray should be his Aurora Greenway.

"When I was doing Mrs Robinson, Dan - who's mainly a film scriptwriter - saw The Graduate and asked me if I remembered the film Terms Of Endearment.

So I got out the VCR and watched it again, but I'd never thought of it as a play until Dan said he thought it would be a great relationship play, and the more I thought about it, the more intrigued I was.

"There'd been the book by Larry McMurtry, and then there was the movie, and now Dan has taken the book and the movie and woven them together to make this incredible, tight, funny, moving, touching, sad piece of life."

The setting may be America, but the plan was always for the premiere to be presented in England.

"It's been about six years in the making, so it's such a joy to see it coming to fruition. Dan's original play had 14 characters, but the British producer said that wasn't a good idea!

"So Dan went away and reduced it to five characters and it's now very intense." Especially for Linda, who is on stage for all but two pages of the script. "I have a very heavy workload, but the play is beautifully shared out. It's just that Aurora talks a lot. She has very strange patterns of speech?" ? "In what way strange, Linda?"

I ask. "Wait and see! Aurora is very self-obsessed and zany, so if she was having a conversation with you, she'd be on her own conversational wavelength and not really concentrating on you. She'd say you were changing the subject, just because you weren't on her conversational path."

Central to Terms Of Endearment is the difficult relationship between the opinionated Aurora and her often pregnant, always headstrong daughter, Emma (to be played by Suranne Jones). "I think Aurora is a character unto herself.

She's a widow who has raised her child single-handedly and has this dread of losing her suitors. She runs the neighbourhood watch; she would reprimand you if you left your garbage outside!" Linda says.

Whereas Sue Ellen and Mrs Robinson had plenty in common, Aurora is poles apart from those wild women.

"If Sue Ellen and Mrs Robinson had lunch, they'd probably have a cocktail and talk about their dreadful marriages. During their eras, that's what women did. They drank to anaesthetise themselves from disappointment, " Linda told an American newspaper.

What if Aurora were to join them for lunch? "She would not approve of their drinking and would think their make-up to be too gaudy.

"She would sit there being quietly judgemental; she always thinks she's right, so she would observe and inwardly criticise what they were doing.

"And if she found out they were having affairs, she would not like that at all. So she's a little school ma'amish."

Sue Ellen continues her drunken ways in repeats on TV, and Dallas is still never far from the thoughts of soap queen Linda at 66. "I treasure the friendships that are now 30 years old.

"We were all together a month ago, at this French country music festival in Mirandi in the Pyrenees. When you arrive, you want to go, 'where am I?' It was the most surreal thing I've ever done, because it was like this big country fair, where everyone was speaking French, dressed as cowboys, singing country and western songs. We had such a ball, we were there for a week!"

Linda Gray stars in Terms Of Endearment, York Theatre Royal, from August 24 to September 15.

Box office: 01904 623568.