A s a t I S r w

His latest role saw him starring as the hero of the hour in a nervejangling shootout. Brummie actor David Harewood saved two penalties as he helped England to victory against a Usain Bolt-led World XI in this year’s charity Soccer Aid bonanza for Unicef.

Given the amount of time he’s spent working in America since 2011 when he won the part of CIA counter-terrorism chief David

Etses in the hugely successful US drama Homeland, you could be forgiven for thinking he should have been playing on the other side.

Never too far away from a 747, the Small Heath-born 52-year-old actor, who in the 1990s scraped a living by supplementing his lowprofile stage roles with minor parts in The Bill, Casualty and Minder, is wowing audiences in the US action series Supergirl.

But wind back 30 years to 1988 and the captivating father of two’s head was in the clouds for an altogether more harrowing reason.

Two years out of RADA and cutting his teeth as an enthusiastic theatre performer, his joie de vivre began to evaporate when the realisation dawned that his ethnicity might have a tangible impact on his career.

“I’d always, perhaps naively, just considered myself an actor, but suddenly I was David Harewood, black actor, and there were these whole other set of rules for black actors and that reality stunned me a little bit.

“I just hadn’t considered the colour of my skin was going to dictate my career. I found it all very confusing.”

David’s bewilderment snowballed and to dampen the gnawing feeling of unease he began self-medicating.

“It takes enormous courage to walk on stage,” remembers David, who lives with his wife Karen and their daughters Maize, 15, and 13-year-old Raven in Streatham, South London, “and I had lost my confidence. Prior to that I’d had this bulletproof, supreme confidence but I’d lost that ability in front of an audience and the only way I could get through a performance was to get sloshed.”

As his drinking continued to mask his plummeting self-esteem, David began to lose his sense of perspective and soon his fragile grip on reality.

“I started to revert to that childlike attitude where I’d just go to any lengths to have a good time.

“That meant me just going out and searching for fun, whether that was singing on the Tube, carrying somebody’s bag down the street or just talking to complete strangers and having a laugh, that’s what I did.”

David’s friends and family grew increasingly concerned by his erratic behaviour but he was unaware of his mushrooming eccentricities and believed he was having the time of his life, in retrospect classic signs of a hypermanic episode experienced by manic depressives.

Today he might well have been diagnosed as bipolar but in 1988 the first GP he saw declared, “He seems to think he’s Lenny Henry,” and prescribed him pills, beha poin need spell tingt Lond “I rem and was v aslee

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