Olivia crowned queen of TV
Broadchurch star Olivia Colman, who plays Elizabeth II in the next series of Netflix’s blockbuster drama on the Royal Family, has been voted the most powerful person in British television
FOR years she was that familiar face on the telly which was so difficult to put a name to. But Olivia Colman, still only 44, has been named by Radio Times as the most powerful person in British television – ahead of Ant & Dec, Benedict Cumberbatch, Idris Elba and even Sir David Attenborough. It is a remarkable achievement.
The little girl from Norwich, who starred in her school play but didn’t really know what she wanted to do when she left, is now one of our finest actresses and happily inhabits, in her words, “this nice, not-at-allsensible world where you are allowed to play for ever”.
Colman – “Collie” to her friends – has starred in some of our most popular TV dramas. She has won three Baftas – Best Actress for her stunning portrayal of Detective Sergeant Ellie Miller in Broadchurch, Best Supporting Actress for her role in the dark drama series Accused and Best Female Comedy Performance for Twenty Twelve. She also won a Golden Globe for Best Supporting Actress in The Night Manager.
Now she has been cast as Queen Elizabeth in Netflix’s ondemand blockbuster series about the Royal Family, The Crown, replacing Claire Foy, who played the younger monarch. It will make her a household name around the world.
But suggesting she’s a national treasure embarrasses her. “I feel a little bit like I’m not ready to have that very nice title on my shoulders just yet,” she said in an interview with Vogue. “I know it comes from a warm and loving place but I wonder if it means I’m at the end of my career – and I feel like I’m only just getting going.” Then she quickly added: “Well at least I hope I am anyway.”
THE modesty is totally genuine. But “just getting going” is a massive understatement. Sarah Caroline Olivia Colman has already hit the heights and surely the only way is up for decades to come.
It hasn’t always been like that of course. Her parents – dad was a chartered surveyor and mum a nurse – worked hard to send her to Gresham’s School near the Norfolk coast, where the current fees are £8,000 a term.
She admits she didn’t make a real impression until at the age of 16 she took the title role in The Prime Of Miss Jean Brodie. “Suddenly I felt really at home,” she says.
The uncertainty continued though and after leaving school she took a teaching course at Homerton College, Cambridge, to give herself breathing space. “I didn’t know what else to do and I still couldn’t quite let myself want to act,” she admits.
It was there she auditioned for the Cambridge Footlights review and met David Mitchell and Robert Webb, who went on to become her co-stars in Channel 4’s Peep Show.
Everything dropped into place. “I suddenly found all these people who were a bit weird and a bit shy like me. People who found being someone else easier somehow than being themselves.”
One of those people was a law student called Ed Sinclair, who also dreamed of being an actor.
They appeared together in a Footlights production of Alan Ayckbourn’s Table Manners and according to Colman it was love at first sight. “That’s the bloke I’m going to marry,” she thought. “He was gorgeous. My husband and I were very lucky. We met when we had nothing and we loved each other then. So we were all right.
“We were 20 and if you meet at that age then you are fine. For me it was thunderbolts straight away. I still feel like I’m punching above my weight.”
The couple married in 2001 and now have three children – two boys and a girl – and Ed has become a novelist and scriptwriter.
Initially Colman became known for her comic talents. Her big breakthrough was in Peep Show before she went on to star in shows such as the Olympics satire Twenty Twelve (narrated by her future Broadchurch co-star David Tennant), Rev and That Mitchell And Webb Look.
Sinclair appeared with her in the cult BBC Two series Look Around You, which featured a long list of people who went on to bigger things, including Matt Lucas, David Walliams and Simon Pegg.
But it was in 2013 that she landed the role of DS Miller in Broadchurch, a part that catapulted her to stardom. Set in a fictional Dorset town it followed the residents of a tight-knit community after a young boy is killed in suspicious circumstances.
Nine million people watched the devastating final episode of series one and saw Colman’s character learn the heartbreaking truth that her husband was the killer. It was the gut-
wrenching, emotional kind of performance for which Colman has now become renowned. She admits that she wells up for the slightest reason – “I have no armour, I’m afraid” – but that should not lessen the magnitude of her acting skills.
Writer Chris Chibnall, who created Broadchurch’s Ellie with Colman in mind, says: “Olivia absolutely embodies all of our contradictions. She’s not afraid to cry but she’s also incredibly tough. She’s funny but she’s able to go into the deepest, darkest emotional territory.
“She inhabits a character from the inside out and most of all she understands what it is like to be alive – how ridiculous it is, how heartbreaking it is and how wonderful it is.”
One of her co-stars once described her extraordinary empathy as being “like a watch with the mechanism visible”.
Colman is honest about her emotions. “If something touches me I cry. That’s it. I’m a bit raw, a bit rubbish really. Often a director will say to me, ‘I don’t think this is a scene where your character cries.’ And all I can say is, ‘Good luck with that!’”
It’s the same in real life. “It was slightly embarrassing at a parents’ meeting when a teacher was nice about my boy and I started to well up,” she says.
“I have a sneaking suspicion that audiences have seen me crying a little bit too often in the past couple of years.
“And if people get really fed up with me then I won’t get more work. And if I can’t do what I love then I will shrivel up and die.” For a while her voice was as recognisable as her face on TV. She did voiceovers for Andrex’s “Be kind to your behind” ads and the Glade fragrance commercial in which her character was a gorilla. But now she is recognised everywhere.
“I do find it weird when people I don’t know are looking at me,” she admits. “But as long as I have Ed and the children everything is all right.”
They are home-loving birds and don’t go out a lot. At the party after she won two of her Baftas she turned to her husband and suggested they sneak home. “We were in our socks, drinking tea by 10 o’clock,” she says joyfully.
How refreshing to find a highflying showbiz couple whose feet are so firmly on the ground.