Twinkle, twinkle, little star

There's an explosion of pyrotechnics and then a beautiful girl becomes visible in the fading smoke, her dress luminous with satin and spangles, a tiara glittering in her golden hair. And a voice rings out: "Cinderella - you shall go to the ball!"

The voice is that of Adele King, or Twink to you and me. She is the woman who has transformed Cinderella with a wave of her magic wand, she is the woman who has created Cinderella, she is the woman who has written and produced Cinderella and has priced everything from her tiara to her glass slippers. And is she proud of herself? Not a bit of it. She says: "I'd like to retire from public life, but I can't afford to. I have a mortgage and two school-going children. There are language classes on a Saturday, extra music classes, nice schools, nice clothes, foreign holidays . . ."

Give it all up, Twink. Send them to a free school in the best of Dunnes Stores' clothes, rent a caravan for a week in Tramore.

"Why should I sacrifice my family?" counters Twink. "Chloe (11) got a place as a Christ Church chorister and she absolutely adores it. It's all very Protestant and proper, she does Evensong. But all she wanted to know was, `Does this mean I can't be in the panto?' "

It doesn't, of course. Come St Stephen's Day, she and her sister Naomi (six) will both be singing and dancing on the Olympia stage. Is the past repeating itself? Twink says she has warned them against having the life of a performer. When one of Chloe's parties clashed with a rehearsal, she told her: "Mummy is giving the warning again. This is exactly what happened to me. I had no childhood." She thinks they have both inherited the performer's `gene', but she consoles herself: "They're both academically smashing at all their subjects and they always get a note to say they're charming at school."

"Academic" is a word Twink loves: "I'm a lost academic," she tells me. Ha, ha, says I; then why has she been on stage all her life? Even when she was threatening to "withdraw from public life" after the bruisingly public row with Samantha Mumba, she went on Marian Finucane to do so. Twink is getting irritated: "I find even being questioned on this offensive. I only really have one regret and that's that I didn't do the career that was my choice. Medicine was always my biggest passion. My really best buddies have nothing to do with this business. It's not me, that's what I can't explain to you."

It all just sort of happened. "I went to St Louis, Rathmines, and they were so musically orientated. Then ploink, I was one of the lead singers with the Young Dublin Singers. They literally auditioned some of us one day for the Gaiety panto, and hey, I got eight shillings a week. I got a guitar. It paid for ponies and tennis. I was an expensive child and we were ordinary, working, middle-class people."

Those expensive tastes again. Could she really afford a pony? "The keep of one," she says, and then explains that they lived in Rathfarnham and were "working horsey people".

And the stage life just kept beckoning, though there's a certain bathos to her assertion that Maxi, Dick and Twink "were like the Spice Girls of their day - travelling around Europe for Bord Failte, doing Opportunity Knocks . . ." Then she was asked to front the Big Eight showband in Las Vegas with Brendan Bowyer: "I asked my wonderful parents, `What should I do?' Like in Che Sara, Sara." She went with the "Will I be famous?" option and then "20 was turning into 30 and 30 into 40 and now 40 is turning into 50 and hey, I'm still here."

Still faced with my refusal to believe in the accidental nature of it all, she admits: "There's one thing - application. I'm a terrific applier. If I was employed as the grounds-sweeper in Taney Church," she says looking out at the grounds in front of the rehearsal hall, "I wouldn't stop until the place was perfect." Is that application in itself a liability? "Yes. I haven't been able to let go." Though she quickly adds: "Then I mightn't have a nice home and be able to send my children to nice schools."

It seems to be that very application which keeps her going in panto after panto. "I do," she says, "have fantasies about stuffing a real turkey instead of Dustin. I could comfortably live without panto in my head, heart and soul - but financially it's a very good earner for me. I'm the producer, performer, writer, and I have three fees. I have to say that, if anything took the backseat for me, it's the performance."

She describes her punishing schedule, which the night before had involved finishing rehearsals at 9.30, heading to the gym, writing her Agony Aunt column for TV Now! ("Because she's been there", as the sub-heading says), and then rewriting the lyrics for three of the songs on a laptop in bed. It was that very gluttony for punishment which got her into panto in the first place: "God, oh God," she remembers, "I had just given birth to Chloe in Holles Street and I got a card which said, `You'd better hurry up and have another one, we're doing Babes in the Wood next year.' I thought doing the panto would be a good excuse to get back in the gym and shed the excess pounds after childbirth."

So began her triumphant reign at the Gaiety, where she and director Mavis Ascott worked on some magical pantos. Her relationship with Comet Productions came a cropper in 1993 when, during the Gaiety run, she got a chance to perform with her idol, Perry Como, in a show which would be beamed out on millions of

American TV sets. She had to pay £11,500 to be released from her contract for the night and it didn't kickstart a life of stardom in America, but a minder of the odious purple dinosaur Barney saw her and loved her.

Barney came to Dublin for the first panto Twink produced, Sleeping Beauty (Sort Of!) in 1996. Her idea of hooking the children into a live stage show through their love of TV paid off, and the next year she managed to lure Dustin onto the stage. This year, he and Soky will be back again.

She thinks the Gaiety has been taking notes at her pantos since, but it hasn't been working. She adds that the Gaiety's loss of June Rodgers this year is a great one and believes she was "under-used" there. One raw day in February the women literally ran into each other in a southside shopping centre and confessed to each other: "I'm not doing next year's panto." "Oh jays, I'm not either." Rodgers stuck to her guns, but Twink relented: "Gerry Sinnott came to me, and we saw these wonderful costumes in the Liverpool Empire and I said, `Oh Gawd, let me at a performance of Cinderella. . ' "

I don't believe for a minute that she doesn't love this panto. Even in a church hall in the gap between Weight Watcher's and badminton, her excitement at the transformation of Cinderella is both obvious and so infectious you almost know this will be a wonderful panto. When Cinders sings, in the opening scene, that she's not meant for "this provincial life", you just can't help thinking of the young Adele prancing around on her ponies in Rathfarnham.

But it does all keep going horribly wrong. I met Twink in the immediate aftermath of the publication of a long interview with her in the Sunday Independent, in which the trauma of her financial deception by solicitor Elio Malocco, which almost lost her home, and her marital troubles had been raked over. Chloe had found and read the article and said: "He [the journalist] doesn't know you, Mummy. You're the best Mummy in the world."

"It's a shame," says Twink, "if I have to have an enforced retirement to stop myself being plucked at by an over-intrusive media."

She doesn't accept that she doesn't help herself by revealing too much - why does she have to comfort a compulsively unfaithful woman in the current issue of TV Now! with the words: "I have been a hopeless and compulsive lover all my life," for instance.

However, that failing in itself doesn't explain why people love to bad-mouth Twink. She doesn't know why herself - "I think I'm a very nice woman", she says - but adds: "I suppose I'm too opinionated, too say-it-like-it-is, too not afraid of them, not kiss-ass enough." Particularly, as a woman? "That's the not allowed bit, isn't it? `It's that bloody bitch again, who does she think she is?' "

Irish society doesn't tolerate much of that, and is an inveterate snob - a panto/ showband/TV comedy star may not have much of a calling card. You can't help feeling that some of this snobbery may have had an effect on Twink herself; she says she'd much prefer to do straight theatre, "but they're not beating a path to my door". Then there's the cruel and inexplicable implication that she is "mutton dressed as lamb", as if an exceptionally attractive 49-year-old woman should not draw attention to herself. If Samantha Mumba's insult that she was "Barbie's Granny" was very clever, the glee with which it was repeated revealed a very ugly streak in us.

"The truth is," says Twink, "I'm song and danced out. You know what they say: `Nobody loves a fairy when she's 40'. Everybody has a shelf life and I think I'm coming to the end of mine."

Then she roars: "Oh No You're Not!"

Cinderella opens at the Olympia Theatre on St Stephen's Day