Anxiety left me fearing I wasn’t up to job
Cilla star Sheridan says dad’s cancer triggered breakdown
SHERIDAN Smith has spoken for the first time about “out of control” anxiety that led to her breakdown last year.
The Cilla star pulled out of her West End show Funny Girl for several months with stress and exhaustion. Her father was also diagnosed with cancer and died in December.
Sheridan, 36, said the part of Fanny was her “dream role”, but depression and anxiety made it hard for her to get perspective.
She said: “So you think, ‘That’s it, this is me. I’m unlovable, I’m inauthentic’.”
Sheridan said she was never nervous early in her career.
But success in stage show Legally Blonde, for which she won an Olivier award, changed things and she was soon working with the likes of Dustin Hoffman and Maggie Smith.
She told Culture magazine: “You’re constantly worrying you’re not going to be as good as people think you should be.
“When you have that degree of anxiety, you can’t just pull yourself together and you can’t explain it.
“It just snowballs until it’s out of control.”
She added: “I didn’t want to talk about it because I just thought people would say, ‘What have you got to be upset about?’ And I was totally grateful.
“But at the same time, I was totally terrified that I was going to come unstuck, that I couldn’t hold these feelings of insecurity in much longer without it coming to a head, which it did last year.
“My dad getting cancer triggered it, but it had been a long time coming.”
Sheridan has now vowed to simplify her career by taking on one job at a time.
She is currently promoting an album, due out on November ahead of a new TV project.
She added: “I’m not going to run myself into the ground again.”