“Chavs and slappers!” That was Sheridan Smith’s tongue-in-cheek assessment, a few years back, of the kinds of characters she tends to play. “Tarts with a heart” is how an interviewer put it to her in 2012. It would be more accurate these days to say that she portrays women on the edge. And that she has quietly become one of the most reliably brilliant actors on British TV.
We’re only a month into the new year, and Smith’s already pulled off a hat-trick of astonishing performances. First up was Four Lives, the enraging BBC drama about the serial killer Stephen Port, and the allegedly homophobic Met Police failings that allowed him to go on killing. Smith played Sarah Sak, the mother of Port’s first victim, Anthony Walgate. Had the police had not dismissed Anthony’s death as self-inflicted, because he was a young, gay sex worker, they might have prevented Port from murdering three more young men. The real-life Sak, who fought tirelessly for the police to treat her son’s death as suspicious, had one request when she spoke to the show’s producers: “I want a gobby northern bird to play me, not some posh actress.”
