Office girl Dawn makes good

She is quite something, Lucy Davis, although she is far too modest to admit it.

All peachy skin, long blonde hair and voluptuous figure, she is open, honest and, well - normal - for an actress. As Dawn Tinsley in the BBC's cult-turned-mainstream comedy The Office, Lucy pits her considerable comic skill - inherited no doubt from father Jasper Carrott - against the might of Ricky Gervais. She is a giggly sort of girl, so goodness knows how she copes with some of the lines she has to deliver in this surreal show. 'Well, if I tell you that one scene we did for the new series took 75 takes, you'll know how hard it is to stop laughing sometimes,' says the 29-year-old, giggling. 'The average for a short scene is 30 takes.'

Lucy is one of life's sunny people; an optimist, certainly and someone for whom, you feel, life has not thrown up too many problems. Which merely goes to show how wrong first impressions can be. Five years ago, Lucy Davis went through a kidney transplant operation that saved her life. It was donated by her mother, Hazel, when Lucy was told that the kidney failure she was suffering from - reflux nephropathy - was incurable. Carrott himself, a man not given to public utterings of emotion, described his wife's actions as 'courageous, because there are dangers in giving a kidney', and was immensely relieved when both wife and daughter recovered fully.

To look at Lucy now, you would never know that anything had ever been amiss. 'But I'm reminded of the illness twice a day when I have to take my pills - 20 a day to stop my body rejecting my new kidney. Although I don't wallow in what happened or think about what might have been. I know that I have been extremely fortunate,' she adds.

It was some eight years ago, when Lucy was just 21 and about to embark on her acting career, that she began to notice how lethargic she was feeling. It wasn't until the following year, however, when she won the part of Maria Lucas in the BBC production of Pride and Prejudice and had to take an obligatory medical, that the problem was diagnosed as kidney failure.

'My career was going well and I was really happy and so I was desperate to go on as though nothing was wrong,' she says, sipping at the first of two bottles of water; one side-effect of her illness is that she has to drink constantly. 'I hate being down and so when this happened, I never went through that phase of asking, "Why me?" because I knew it wouldn't get me anywhere. My family were great about it but all I was thinking was that they must be really frightened and I'm the one putting them through all this. I didn't let myself think that I might die.'

When she was told that a transplant was her only hope, Lucy's entire family went in for tests. Her mother was found to be the perfect match. The operation went ahead just before Christmas 1997, '...and I was out of hospital within eight days. I felt dreadful, big and groggy and then I'd keep looking over at Mum in her hospital bed and thinking how she must be feeling. But we're fine now. I keep joking with her that she's given me a menopausal kidney. It does feel weird having a kidney inside me that's 22 years older than me.'

A mere three weeks after her operation, Lucy returned to work as the voice of Hayley Jordan in The Archers. 'Even though they were very kind and offered to come to my home to record my bit, I went in and sat there with my pillows and recorded it in the studio.'

Her main problem was the side-effects of the drugs: diabetes and ballooning weight, brought on by taking steroids. 'Steroids give you a huge appetite. If you can imagine eating a huge Sunday lunch and feeling stuffed, well, I'd do that and then carry on eating more. I put on a massive amount of weight,' she says, 'two stones in three months - and my weight went up to 12 stone. When I went for jobs there would always be people who were thinner and, for a while, I didn't think I'd get any parts. Then I got a job on the children's series Belfry Witches - as Old Noshie, the big witch, of course.

'People everywhere treated me differently,' she continues. 'Men in particular. If I was in a bar with my best mate, they'd only talk to her. People don't realise how hurtful that is and it did dent my confidence, but it also made me work harder on jobs. When I came off the steroids, the weight didn't go down automatically so I had to go on a diet and lose it sensibly. I didn't go mad - just ate healthily and carefully and I still do that.'

Her boyfriend, actor Richard Manson, has, she says, 'been incredibly supportive' and although the couple have been together since they met at drama school 11 years ago, there are no plans to marry or have children. 'I don't think my illness has affected my ability to have children, but to be honest, I never really allowed myself to think that far in advance. I don't want children just yet, though, as I'm really enjoying work at the moment.'

Lucy's drive and determination are traits that she's inherited from her father, Jasper Carrott, whose real name is Bob Davis. Brought up far from the showbiz whirl in the Birmingham suburb of Knowle, Lucy was the eldest of four children. She remembers her childhood with nothing but fondness. 'Our parents never spoilt us. Neither of them were well off when they were young, so they didn't want any of us to take money and possessions for granted. We had friends who had every state-of-the-art convenience - TVs, hi-fis, everything - but we only started getting them gradually. My parents wanted us to know the value of money and to realise that you had to work hard to get what you wanted in life.