jane horrocks, that her acting career has spanned four decades and has seen her excel on stage and screen from comedies to musicals. increasingly, she s written and created her own shows, is that the pathway to empowerment in an industry where actors can be just another commodity? jane horrocks, welcome to hardtalk. thank you very much. it is great to have you in the studio. you have been in this acting business for almost four decades, i wonder when you think about your own career, do you feel that you very consciously shaped it or is it more a question of serendipity and stuff thatjust happened? i think there is a lot of both actually, yes. i think i did engineer quite a lot of it in that my choices were very specific but certain things happened at a certain time that kind of formed it as well. and when you think about the big choices, the key choices that you made that were instrumental in shaping your career, what would you point to? i think probably the biggest choice th
a very famous drama school, and then you d gotten into the royal shakespeare company, which most young actors would just regard as the best, biggest break, you sort of walked away from shakespeare. i just think at that time, being from a kind of working class background, ijust didn t think, and the way i spoke and the way i was, that i was their fodder at that time, so i d be working my way up in a very incremental sort of way rather than landing a fabulous part very early on. so, i kind of thought actually it s not going to serve me right here right now. that is interesting cos we have had other actors on this show who have talked