Badu company: how Kathy Mullen fell for the puppet world

She's been Yoda's right hand, learned with the greats, such as Jim Henson and Frank Oz, and worked on much-loved shows such as Fraggle Rockand The Muppets, but Kathy Mullen came to puppetry almost accidentally.

"I was an actress, living in New Orleans," recalls Mullen. "And I met a girl in a show I was doing, who said: 'Do you sing? A friend of mine needs somebody who sings for a puppet show.' I said 'sure', and she said, 'well, come down and meet her' - and so I started doing puppets for this woman."

She enjoyed it so much that she continued to work with the puppets for four years, moving with the show to New York, where she then got a job with the Muppet workshop.

"I thought that was going to be just temporary, but they were doing The Muppet Movieat the time, and Jim hired me on the movie," she says. "I stayed with him for 10 years after that."

It was Henson, and the legendary Frank Oz, who taught Mullen what she knows about puppetry. "They were the particular ones that I really learned from. You learned it on the job - I was thrown into the fire!" she says.

Mullen assumed that she'd eventually return to acting, but found puppetry so fulfilling that she never looked back. "I never thought I'd fall in love with it the way I did," she says, her hands dancing in the air like naked puppets.

Her experience with Henson and Oz eventually landed her a role on the set of the first Star Wars, as Yoda's right hand. "I was just one little part of him," she says, with Oz operating Yoda's head and left hand, and another woman in charge of operating his eyes.

She also speaks fondly of Fraggle Rockand is particularly proud of one of the Doozer characters she helped bring to life.

"I loved doing a little Doozer girl called Cotterpin. She would drive around on her little motorcycle and refuse to do what everyone else was doing - she was sort of the rebel," she recalls.

But having worked with so many characters over the years, she admits that there's one that resonates more than others.

"I find that I have one character that, since I created her, follows me through, only she tends not to be the same puppet," Mullen says. "She started out as a chicken, she's now a parrot, and she kind of follows me through as this quite elegant, middle-aged lady character - and she just seems to be following me.

"Her form changes, but the character's the same . . . She's very loving, but she's very no-nonsense. I think it's probably the way I want to be."