Who is May McFettridge?

It is 10 years since May McFettridge first swanned out on to the stage of the Belfast Grand Opera House, seized the Christmas pantomime by the scruff of its scrawny neck and gave it a good pummelling. From May's scarlet gash of a mouth, insults and saucy innuendoes flew, right, left and centre - at the audience, at the other cast members and at an unsuspecting, po-faced family, seated in one of the expensive boxes, whom she accused of looking like "a Sinn Fein press conference". In those days, when Sinn Fein politicians could be seen but not heard on television and radio, this audaciously apt ad-lib brought the house down. Since then, May's manners have not improved, her dresses have got bigger and bolder and her sharp tongue could strip paint in the Harland and Woolf dry dock. But public devotion to this peculiarly androgynous figure of Ulster fun knows no bounds. In the hands of her softly-spoken alter ego John Linehan, she has become something of a cultural icon - part of the Christmas furniture at the Opera House, where, in the 101 years of its life, she has given more performances than any other person, real or imagined, living or dead. But, beneath the loud mouth, who is May McFettridge?

John Linehan is the person who knows her best: "May is a wee woman from north Belfast. She'll have nothing to do with any talk of transvestites and transsexuals. She has always been her own person and she still is. She's not silly enough to think that she's everyone's cup of tea. She just loves entertaining the people of Belfast. She's had offers to do shows across the water, but Belfast will not let her go."

Before May's arrival, Linehan was a car mechanic. But when he was in his 30s, he contracted meningitis and was given 36 hours to live. "I was given the Last Rites," he recalls. "But I survived. God didn't want me and the devil was afraid of me. But my mechanic days were over, so I packed up the toolbox and got out the lipstick. How did my mates react? Never mind my mates, what about my wife and daughter? "My mother just kept saying, `You're doing what, son? You're doing what?' But May caught on. She was on local radio and television and then her big break came when she appeared with Jimmy Cricket in Robinson Crusoe at the Opera House in 1991. She hasn't been away from there since." This Christmas May will play the Nurse in the Opera House's Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, with Swedish blonde Britt Eklund and former skating champion Robin Cousins cast in the unenviable roles of the celebrity sacrificial lambs.