Anoushka Lucas has just released an album. But a few years ago, the 38-year-old singer-songwriter had decided to give up on her dream of a music career for good. After spending most of her twenties chasing a record deal and putting £18,000 towards making her first album, Dark Soul, only for it to earn her a grand total of £83, Lucas felt depressed and heartbroken. “I was 31, I was really tired and really poor... I stopped gigging, I didn’t see my band for three or four years, I was like, I’m an actor now”.
Lucas likes to joke she is the “only person in theatre in it to make money”. But, boy, has she had a good few years. She did a series of odd writing jobs for theatre in her early twenties to pay the bills, then, when she was 27, a casting director encouraged her to give acting a go. “The rest is history... quite consciously I was like, you can’t keep chasing this thing that doesn’t want you when there’s the other thing, acting, that actually does.”
