There are some actors who work hard at making their job appear as difficult as possible.

Robert de Niro famously spent three months working as a cab driver before starring in Taxi Driver, Daniel Day Lewis insisted on staying in character as disabled artist Christy Brown throughout the whole duration of shooting My Left Foot and in order to look suitably distressed in Marathon Man, Dustin Hoffman felt it necessary to deprive himself of sleep for two days.

One suspects that this dark brooding group of method actors would find the ever-genial Peter Sallis something of an irritant.

"The truth is," he says in an stage whisper perfected over six decades in the business . "If you're good at it, acting is very easy. Honestly, it requires very little effort at all."

At 86 years old, and having rarely been out of work, Sallis has earned the right to blow trade secrets, and as he prepares to go out on the road with his one-man show, he is equally pragmatic about further additions to an already enviable CV.

"Acting is an absolute pleasure," he says. "For those who do it even reasonably well there will always be parts to play, so unless they only start offering roles as Polish weightlifters then I'll continue saying yes. Retiring isn't an option."

To prove the point, Sallis has been in Yorkshire filming the 36th series of Last of the Summer Wine. The sitcom about nothing very much in particular has the ability to conjure up feelings of warm nostalgia for a gentler age of comedy. Alternatively, just the first stirrings of the theme tune can cause irrational outpourings about the unchanging state of British television.

Sallis isn't inclined to wade into such debates, however. For him, the scenery around Holmfirth is just a workplace and playing Norman Clegg just a job, albeit one that he's been grateful to hold on to for the best part of his career.

He has a seemingly well-worn response to those who accuse the programme of being an outdated relic, best consigned to a museum.

"I have always compared it to Wind in the Willows," says the actor, who also provided the voice of Kenneth Grahame's Ratty in the 1980s' TV adaptation. "How old is that book now? Eighty years old and people still buy it, things don't necessarily become less entertaining as they get older.

"Last of the Summer Wine was based on the same premise, it was about three friends messing about in the countryside.

"It wasn't any deeper than that, but it does have a timeless quality to it."

While watching Last of the Summer Wine, written by Roy Clarke, may have become more guilty secret than fashionable Sunday teatime viewing, Sallis has always had a fatalistic approach to the role which others may have worried would become a millstone, overshadowing the chance of playing anything other than a sensible and unremarkable pensioner.

"Now we normally have a three or four year break between series, and I don't think the thought of being typecast has ever crossed my mind," he says.

"I've never ever thought about leaving the show, why would I? It will be Roy's decision when it comes to an end. People always say you should go out on a high, but in fact the end of every series is a high.

"People criticise the show, but it's the BBC which has kept us going for so long and if they keep commissioning it, then I'll keep coming up to Yorkshire, which has been a great place to work, although it does seem to rain much more up there than any other part of the country.

"The last filming schedule was quite badly disrupted, but when the heavens open we go into our caravan for a sleep or to listen to the radio. You know in all the years we've been doing Last of the Summer Wine we've never had a card school, which is probably a great missed opportunity."

It would be one of the few for the actor, who fell into the industry entirely by accident after deciding to sign up for the RAF during the Second World War and failing the medical.

Grounded, he spent the war years as a radio instructor and, having got his first taste of the stage entertaining fellow troops at the base in a production of Noel Coward's Hay Fever, he went on to study at RADA before becoming a full-time jobbing actor working with the likes of John Gielgud and Orson Welles.

When persuaded to write his autobiography, Fading into the Limelight, it was the behind-the-scenes tales which formed the basis of the book and which he now recounts during his one-man show, which comes to Harrogate Theatre next week.

"It's hard not to enjoy going on stage in front of 200 or 300 people and showing off," says Sallis. "I always have an idea of what I'm going to say when I go on stage, but there's also a great sense of freedom to plunder from a library of anecdotes.

"To be honest, when I started the book my main worry was that I wouldn't have enough to fill it. I had visions of getting to the end of chapter one and thinking, 'Oh dear, that's it, I've summed my life up in a couple of hundred words'.

"It was very great fun. I can't see very well any more, but I dictated it all on to a little tape machine and when I started I couldn't stop."

So there's the time he travelled round Paris in a converted cattle truck with Orson Welles, who was too fat to fix in a taxi, and reminiscences about one particularly committed performance from Laurence Olivier whose face Sallis says turned "livid green", and John Gielgud's conspicuous lack of political correctness while touring Rhodesia.

"It's all good fun", says Sallis, sounding ever the amiable host, for whom the theatre is as comfortable as his own living room. "I remember one time in France with Welles where I received a mysterious telephone call summoning me to the deserted and rather spooky Gare d'Orsay. When I got there, he said he wanted me to help dub Hungarian bit-players in his cinema adaptation of Kafka's The Trial. The whole episode was, to coin a phrase, and rather fittingly, Kafka-esque."

Somewhat inevitably when people meet Sallis, talk soon turns to Wallace and Gromit and even the most sensible interviewers have felt compelled to ask how much he really likes cheese. The answer is not that much, but the man who modestly says Nick Park's animation "notched his profile up a peg or two" is not one to tire of talking about the films which gave him, or at least his voice, an international audience.

So much so that last year, amid the usual A-List crush at the Academy Awards, a rather odd looking group including Sallis and Parks shuffled up the red carpet and returned clutching an Oscar for Wallace and Gromit in The Curse of the Were Rabbit.

"It was a once-in-a-lifetime experience," he says of his trip from his London home to LA. "Nick was very kind to invite me as his guest. We have known each other for the best part of 25 years and his success is well-deserved. When The Curse of the Were Rabbit came out, we hadn't done a Wallace and Gromit for 10 years, and if he decides to do any more, of course I would want to be a part of it, but until I get the call I will carry on as normal."

Earlier this year, Sallis was awarded an OBE in the Queen's Birthday Honours for services to drama – news he seems to have greeted with the same quiet sense of satisfaction with which he views his entire career.

"Of course it meant a great deal to me and it would have been churlish not to accept," he says, laughing gently. "I had never even dreamed of something like that happening to me, but when it does, it means a lot."


An Evening With Peter Sallis, Harrogate Theatre, July 24. 01423 502116, www.harrogatetheatre.co.uk