SINGING Handel's Messiah with a shocking mohican haircut perhaps isn't the typical path towards a successful career in opera, but Alice Coote's punk phase did give her a taste for the theatrical.

"I used to go to Manchester and buy all the pointed shoes, the leather and the chains," she says.

"I used to walk around Northwich with black nail varnish and vertical crimped black hair. I was trying to express something, to say I was different or had something to say. It was strange as I never wanted to be looked at. I'm shy in social situations but it was something expressive and I was a full blown punk.

"But one day I had my hair cut. It stopped in 24 hours and I turned into a very well behaved girl."

Before she gave up on her image though, Alice did manage to sing that Messiah as a die-hard punk.

"At 17 I sang it with a mohican, back combed and vertical. I remember the ripple of shock going through the audience but I just carried on singing."

Alice will hope to have a different kind of dramatic effect on audiences at the Theatre Royal this week when she plays Charlotte in Massenet's tragic opera Werther; one of three productions Opera North will be staging in Nottingham.

"It's such a romantic story, such a tearjerker," she says. "Everyone who comes to see it at one point or another has a jolly good weep, we should be handing out Kleenex."

In the show, Charlotte promises her mother to marry a family friend but falls in love with Werther.

"Charlotte has such a hard fate," says Alice. "Her destiny is mapped out by family obligations but her heart chooses something different for her as often our hearts do. She's inextricably linked to Werther and it causes her downfall because she cannot turn her back on him."

The role is proving an emotional rollercoaster for Alice.

"It's exhausting, particularly in this production," she says. "I did it once before in Germany and it wasn't as intense. This is incredibly truthful, it's not a stock operatic production, more like a film in the way it draws people in. I love the part but it's incredibly tough.

"The music is some of the most beautiful, lush, romantic and tuneful that I will ever get to sing. The orchestra is magical and creates such an electric atmosphere that it's a privilege to be part of the show."

Alice is returning to Opera North, the Leeds-based company that gave her a first major role, to play Charlotte.

"They found me and nurtured me so it's incredibly meaningful to have gone away for a long time and to have returned. It's like coming back to family as it's 13 years since I was there. The ethos of doing good work is still there and it's great being back in the north of England which is where I'm from."

Alice hails from Cheshire, where her parents were both artists and had a deep love of music.

"I probably heard music coming through the womb before I was born. Music was playing in the house constantly, whether on my father's gramophone or Radio 3," she says. "And I remember being taken to the proms, driven down in our little Citroen 2CV.

"My home was very much art-based, my father still paints away in the studio in the house. So the freedom to be visual, which opera and theatre needs, was there.

"I was singing from three or four, driving people mad on journeys by singing non-stop from Cheshire to East Anglia, using the seatbelt holder as a microphone."

Alice's first music teacher immediately spotted her mature voice but she also felt herself that "something bigger than me was coming out of me".

But unlike her character Charlotte, Alice never had to battle between family duty and her own desires, even when shocking her parents as a punk.

"My parents always supported me," she says. "They just didn't always know what they were supporting."

OPERA NORTH

WHERE: The Theatre Royal, Nottingham.

WHEN: November 3-7. Mozart's Cosi Fan Tutte (November 3 and 6); Massenet's Werther (November 4 and 7); The Adventures of Mr Broucek (November 5).

TICKETS: £14.50-£54.

BOX OFFICE: 0115 989 5555.