sometimes still feel that they felt acting is dominantly a middle and upper middle class preserve and that working class people who want to be actors, sometimes for example are told that their voice doesn t quite fit and they have to change it. that happened to you? they did encourage me to mellow my accent at rada, as you can hear i didn t take any notice of that and it has actually been my fortune, is my voice, it has been so much more beneficial than if i had lost it but i think that, i don t know, because i made that choice early on with the royal shakespeare company, because at that stage, i don t know anything about the royal shakespeare company now and i m sure it s very, very different but when i was there, people who landed the big roles, very much had rp voices, but it could well be so different now. i ve not really experienced
and, that is still definitely the case. is that one key reason you say, i have taken to writing and i ve done a lot of my own work, generating stuff you can then perform for yourself? it is a form of proactive creation of roles that maybe women should feel confident enough to do in ways perhaps some don t at the moment? yes, it was as relevant when i was at the rsc all those years ago, the royal shakespeare company, i remember a meeting withjuliet stevenson, lindsay duncan, fiona shore, speaking out about the lack of roles for women, and because they, i, were young then as well, but i was so young, i thought what are they talking about. and i totally did not understand that then because i have got my whole career ahead of me and there
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 that i made was leaving the rsc. the royal shakespeare company? yes, which was my firstjob and they offered me another season and i thought, actually, i don t think i m going to progress in this company in the same way i could possibly progress outside of it. that s very interesting because for most young actors,
who want to be actors, sometimes for example are told that their voice doesn t quite fit and they have to change it. that happened to you? they did encourage me to mellow my accent at rada, as you can hear i didn t take any notice of that and it has actually been my fortune, is my voice, it has been so much more beneficial than if i had lost it but i think that, i don t know, because i made that choice early on with the royal shakespeare company, because at that stage, i don t know anything about the royal shakespeare company now and i m sure it s very, very different but when i was there, people who landed the big roles, very much had rp voices, but it could well be so different now. i ve not really experienced so much of that throughout the rest of my career because the choices that i ve made and the directors
and then you d gotten into the rsc, which most young actors would just regard as the best, biggest break, you sort of walked away from shakespeare. yeah, 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 theirfodder 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 because we have had other actors on this show who have talked about the degree to which they felt and sometimes still feel that they felt acting is dominantly a middle and upper middle class preserve and that working class people