Actor Simon Williams cannot understand why people think men aren't romantic.

Not content with penning Nobody's Fool, Williams will don drag to assume the role of Myrtle Banbury, queen of romantic fiction.

Although this follows on the heels of his successful play Nobody's Perfect and contains three of the same characters, he says it is not a sequel.

The idea for the first one came after a chance remark from his publisher.

"I told her I'd like to write a romantic comedy," he says. "But she told me men don't write romantic fiction.

"That's what drove me to write the play. There is a myth that Englishmen don't show their emotions but we are all romantic underneath."

In Nobody's Perfect, Williams played a failed novelist collecting rejection slips for his romantic novel. As soon as he changed gender to Myrtle Banbury, he became a great success.

In Nobody's Fool, Myrtle is enjoying life as a successful old woman until an ambitious television journalist tries to make a fly-on-the wall documentary about her life.

So what made Williams resurrect the characters?

"I got so many letters from people saying how much they enjoyed Nobody's Perfect," he says. "Some had actually been to see it two or three times. So I decided there was still some mileage in the characters and I would write another play."

Simon is best remembered for his role as James Bellamy in the successful television series Upstairs, Downstairs, which is still showing on UKTV and says he is still proud of the role.

The son of renowned actor and playwright Hugh Williams, it's perhaps surprising Williams did not write his first novel, Talking Oscars, until he was 40.

"It was a thriller and they nicknamed me the Dick Francis of the Theatre," he says. "If I had had more confidence, I would have become a writer earlier.

"But I just love being in a theatre. It is wonderful to be on stage when the theatregoers are having a really good time."