Star of stage and screen Lesley Sharp talks to Jane McGowan about success, Scott & Bailey and her forthcoming role in The Seagull
If there was a list of actresses detailing feisty, yet compassionate women in gritty, mostly northern dramas, then Lesley Sharp’s name would surely be at the top.
Over the past 20 years, Lesley has starred in some of this country’s best films (The Full Monty, Naked, Vera Drake); small screen dramas (Clocking Off, Moving On, Scott & Bailey); and countless theatre productions (A Taste of Honey, The God of Hell) – all to great acclaim.
Now she is taking on the role of another feisty female in the form of Irina Arkadina in Anton Chekhov’s The Seagull, which arrives at The Lyric, Hammersmith this month.
“Irina’s amazing,” says the 57-year-old. “She’s this brilliant combination of someone incredibly loving yet incredibly narcissistic. She’s a real survivor and because of that and bringing a child up on her own and having to work so hard to earn everything she has, it has made her into a bit of a self-centred, grandiose character who is also vulnerable, so yes, a contradiction, but amazing to play.”
Lesley was born in Manchester in 1960 and grew up in Formby on the Lancashire coast. She says the desire to act came from the “classic mix of being a very shy child but wanting to show off as well” and a love of comedian Dick Emery, whose show the family would watch without fail each week.
“I was reserved, a lot of actors are, but they want to find out why people do what they do. You initially want to be seen and appreciated and applauded, then as you get older you want different things from it.
“It’s a fantastic job and I feel very lucky to be doing it, even though sometimes you feel like you put yourself in the position where you’re going to be judged for it, which is very unnerving. But on the whole you work with very creative, funny, unbigoted people, so I feel very lucky.”
And while she has comes to terms with the fact that people may critique what she does on stage or screen, she is in no way a fan of “red carpeting” or intrusion into her home life (she is married to actor and fellow Scott & Bailey star Nicholas Gleaves with whom she has two children). She is a fiercely private person – when I ask about her family she replies, “If you don’t mind, I’m not going to talk about my family, is that OK?” ina don’t-even-go-there-voice, which makes me feel like I am in the interrogation room in a certain Manchester police station. She did, however, choose to reveal a lot of her personal history when she took part in the BBC documentary programme Who Do You Think You Are? in 2013.
Lesley had been adopted when she was six weeks old and, although she had a happy childhood, she has spoken previously about how being adopted left her feeling that, “deep, deep, deep down inside that you don’t belong”. She had already traced her birth mother and the show introduced her to her birth father’s descendants, giving her a fuller image of the man who abandoned her mother after an office affair. She said at the time: “Now there is a picture I have been given of this human being rather than this one-dimensional character and, slightly, bad guy... a blank figure who left my mum, did a runner.”
Lesley quit her Lancashire home aged 18 and headed south to study acting at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama in East London. She carved out a successful stage career before hitting the big screen in the bawdy 80s Bradford-based comedy Rita, Sue and Bob Too. What followed was appearances in a string of television hits by writers such as Kay Mellor, Sally Wainwright, Jimmy McGovern and Paul Abbott.
Given her screen credentials, it may come as no surprise to learn that Lesley is a passionate advocate of women’s roles in the industry: “We make up 50% of the population so it is right and proper and good that we are represented in all kinds of different ways and one of those ways is the arts.”
I almost feel the need to applaud, such is the force of the sentiment. I can certainly see why she gets offered the roles she does.
“A lot of the questions I got asked when I was in Scott & Bailey were, ‘What’s it like being in a show where the two leads are women, that’s written by a woman, directed by a woman etc,’ and my response to that was always, ‘Do you ever ask Christopher Ecclestone or Jimmy Nesbitt or whoever how they feel about a production where they are playing opposite a man and it’s being directed by a man and it was written by a man?’ And they don’t because it’s not an issue for them, and it’s about time it wasn’t an issue for us too. I think it’s sad we are still having to have that conversation.”
Her most recent television appearance was as police officer Maggie Oliver in the brilliant but often harrowing docu-drama Three Girls, which dealt with the Rochdale child sex trafficking scandal.
“A project like that has a lot of baggage with it,” she says. “You are playing a real person and you have to tread very carefully. You’re dealing with real events, with people who were absolutely at the coal face of what was a very, very difficult time in the history of that community. My job was to be as truthful and absolutely respectful to the story as possible.
“But it’s a fantastic opportunity when the job you are trained to do is of some use somehow. It’s not just about entertaining people, it’s about taking part in a project that’s saying, ‘Did you know that this happened? Did you know that it happened like this?’ To be part of that is a real privilege.”
But it was ITV hit Scott & Bailey that propelled her and co-star Suranne Jones (Doctor Foster) into the television stratosphere. The team decided to call it a day after 33 episodes (despite regularly achieving viewing figures of more than 6m an episode), which Lesley thinks was the right decision. She is, however, incredibly grateful and proud to have been part of the show.
“Things come to end, and it’s much better for them to end when they are still good, rather than them being dragged on and on and on,” she says. “You also get to a place where you have to keep topping the storylines. And the truth of the matter is that the detectives we were portraying in the MIT [Major Incident Team] do deal with murders, but very often they are much more mundane cases about drugs or family-feud stuff. They are not on a day-to-day basis dealing with serial killers, or people running amok in Manchester.
“The great thing was that it was two women juggling careers and all sorts of stuff – succeeding in work yet flailing in their very complex family lives. Sometimes these characters may have had a few months of happy marriages, the kids are fine, there are no serial killers at large, but on TV that’s not what people want to see. Scott & Bailey knew what it was as a show and it knew when it had to come to an end. Although it’s sad to leave all the friends behind, you just have to be grateful that it was great.”
So although we may not be seeing Lesley stalking the streets of Manchester as Janet Scott – nicking bad guys by day while negotiating teenage sexting at home – any longer, her performance in The Seagull is probably one you shouldn’t miss.
“It’s going to be fabulous, you know,” she says with real passion. “We’re having such a fantastic time already and The Lyric is such a vibrant centre in Hammersmith. It’s a game changer the way it approaches theatre and it should be really celebrated. I’m having a ball working here, I really am.”
What more could you ask for?
- The Seagull is at The Lyric, Hammersmith,from October 3 – November 4. For details, visit: lyric.co.uk
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