I liked my own company as a child. I grew up in the Cotswolds – Laurie Lee’s Cider with Rosie is like a documentary of my childhood. I liked playing in the woods down by the stream. I would take a book with me. I’d dress up and pretend to be other people, do plays with other kids in front rooms. It started early.
There was always music at home. My mum was a teacher; my dad was an accountant. My dad played lots of instruments and the music would be classical – African, choral, modern. My grandmother in Ghana played guitar in a palm court orchestra in the 1920s. All I ever really wanted to be was a bass player in a punk band.
There were three black people in our village: me, my dad and my brother. I was the only girl of colour in a secondary school of over 1,000 kids. Children seize on your difference. But they also seize on your smartness and your comedy value. I could also fight – I learned very quickly that that was the way to say, “This far and no further.”
Where I grew up, nobody was an actress. I had the interview at Cambridge University to do law, but I flunked all my A-levels. That was around the time my parents were divorcing. Eventually, I started the law degree, but bailed after two years because I’d joined a black women’s group at Bristol Polytechnic and met a San Francisco woman called Deb’bora John-Wilson, who ran acting classes. She got funded to do a show in London and suggested I audition for it – I got the part. It was a time of great awakening.
My three years on Casualty taught me discipline. I worked with the great Derek Thompson [who played Nurse Charlie Fairhead]. He’d been in it from the get-go, but would come to work every day, infused with how we could make a scene more vibrant, more credible, give it extra swing. I took a lesson from that.
My first baby came along as my career started, so I’ve always had kids and worked. None of them are actors. They’re smart, funny and curious and I feel proud that my kids can be in any room with anyone and engage in conversation.
My husband [novelist Howard Cunnell] is my best pal. We met when I was running a fantasy football league at the Royal Court. I support Leeds and he supports Arsenal.
All those clichés about getting older are true. I have a birdsong app; I love gardening. You start to become consciously alert to things that are precious in your life: the people you love, the causes you support. You start to have a life that goes forwards and backwards. In my heart I’m still a 14-year-old punk rocker watching the Clash.
My faith is enormously important to me. I was born in a Christian household and I’ve searched for the spark of the divine. I’m a reader in the Church of England, which means I can preach, lead services and do funerals. I like to engage with people. Whether it’s up the front at church, doing a silly panto or being in telly programme, it’s all the same to me.
The Red King is on Alibi now
