Her TV career started early on the Weatherfield cobbles, but nothing could top the excitement of a role on Postman Pat
LETTER TO MY YOUNGER SELF
At 16, my main passion was acting. And I was getting to do it. I got a role in Coronation Street three months after I turned 16. I was a pretty early starter, in the nicest sense. I’d always wanted to be an actor. And by then I’d done some TV work on Yorkshire Television, I’d done kids TV including a series by Kay Mellor [Just Us]. So I had done my GCSEs, which didn’t go as well as I’d expected – I think I believed everyone when they said they weren’t revising, then they all did really well – gone to college and had started acting.
I didn’t grow up going ‘poor me’, because I was surrounded by people who didn’t have money. I was living at home with my mum and stepdad on a council estate in Cottingley, Leeds. And we knew what the people on the new estate thought of us. But there were bigger differences about me than the fact we didn’t have much money. I was one of the only brown people on the estate, me and my brothers. So that was the thing that made us stand out. I had a real sense of community and pride on our estate. I only realised I didn’t have much when I went to drama classes because they were full of people from north Leeds, so I was mixing with people from the big Victorian villa houses.
My mum inspired me massively.
She is an incredible person. I could talk to her about anything. I have exactly that relationship with my kids now. Although it’s a different world. By my age, my mum had three children and they’d all moved out. Mum always had a few jobs – she’d be working full time, have another job at the weekend and something else during the week. And she still didn’t quite make ends meet. I remember knowing how amazing she was but also that she wasn’t properly compensated. The money that came into our house did not reflect the work she was putting in. It inspired me to try very hard to not make that my life.
We never felt our financial situation would hold us back. I never thought, ‘Oh, this is my lot’. Most people stayed on the estate and went to work in the factory, but I didn’t realise being an actor was a middle-class kind of job. I didn’t think it wasn’t for me. My mum never let me know that, and I’m so grateful. When I said I wanted to be an actor, she just said, “OK, let’s find out how you do it” – because of course we didn’t know the way into the industry or that it was so hard. It’s even harder
