ITV’s new drama The Long Shadow has just started streaming, and it promises viewers a spine-tingling journey into the police hunt to capture the Yorkshire Ripper, aka Peter Sutcliffe.
Sutcliffe murdered thirteen women and attacked countless more during his rampage of terror in the 1970s – and among his victims was mother-of-two Emily Jackson, who died in 1976. She had turned to sex work to raise money for her family, and was brutally attacked by Sutcliffe; he stabbed her more than fifty times with a screwdriver and bludgeoned her with a hammer.
In the show, Emily is played by Katherine Kelly, whom eagle-eyed viewers might recognise for playing Becky McDonald in ITV soap opera Coronation Street until 2012. But who is she? We break it down.
Who is Katherine Kelly?
Kelly was born on 19 November, 1979, in Barnsley, Yorkshire. She comes from a theatrical family: her father, John, established The Lamproom Theatre in Barnsley in 1998. Kelly herself was raised between Yorkshire and the USA, but trained at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art alongside Laurence Fox and Leo Bill.
After graduating, she landed the role of Becky McDonald on Coronation Street and played her between 2006 and 2012 – netting several awards in the process, including a National Television Award in 2012 for Best Serial Drama Performance.
She also appeared in BBC blockbuster Happy Valley as DI Jodie Shackleton – a role that was written specifically for her by the show’s creator Sally Wainwright, and for which she prepared by shadowing police detectives around the Halifax area. In 2020, she moved back from North London to her hometown of Barnsley.
London theatre audiences may know her from her performances in She Stoops to Conquer at the National Theatre in 2012, and City of Angels at the Donmar Warehouse in 2014.
What has she said about the show?
Kelly has talked previously about the impact of growing up in South Yorkshire during Sutcliffe’s murderous rampage. “When you’re from that area, you grow up in foreknowledge of those five years of terror, it still lives within those people who lived through that time, it changed everything,” she said recently.
“There was nobody that wasn’t touched by that period of time. I think it’s quite hard to imagine that really, because it wasn’t in an abstract way. It was on a day to day.”
She added, “You went and you met women from the bus… if a woman was 10 minutes late for work, it was panic. It wasn’t, ‘Oh, she has missed the bus.’ It was, ‘Right, where is she?’”
She also talked about the challenge of playing Jackson in a respectful way.
“I think the responsibility when you’re playing somebody - I’m even wary of using the word character, because she existed, and the responsibilities are not something that I take lightly,” she said.
“I always have to walk with the fact that one day I may be confronted by one of her friends or family members, and I have to look them in the eye and I’m answerable to that. And that’s where my thoughts rest.”
