CORRIE SINEAD
ACTRESS Katie McGlynn reveals she had to go for counselling because she was so badly affected by filming the harrowing death of young mum Sinead Tinker in Corrie.
The 26- year- old star, who moved viewers to tears in her final episode on Friday night, tells the Sunday Mirror she couldn’t stop crying and felt she was mourning an actual friend after watching the distressing scenes.
“It was like the storyline got embedded in my head. I couldn’t stop thinking about it and crying,” says Katie who wore Sinead’s pyjamas while watching the show, a month after filming ended.
Her grief was so bad that she even imagined seeing her character in the Street and hearing her voice.
Eventually she had sessions with a mental health specialist to help her come to terms with Sinead’s tragic cervical cancer battle.
Millions watched her character’s emotional last moments in the arms of her husband Daniel, played by Rob Mallard. But the build-up to her death had been equally as heartrending.
Katie says: “I was sitting on my sofa watching the programme in which Sinead is told she has weeks to live, and I started to cry. The next day I just kept crying. I couldn’t stop.
“I ended up going to see a counsellor who told me I was mourning Sinead.
“A month later I still feel like I’m really mourning her. It feels like waves of sadness coming over me.
“One minute I’ll be all right, then the next I’m in tears. It might sound weird, but to me Sinead has always been real.”
Katie added: “Sometimes I hear her voice and I have mistakenly thought I have caught a glimpse of her face in a crowd of people.
“When I look in the mirror a piece of Sinead looks back at me.”
A month later I’m still mourning Sinead. It feels like waves of sadness come over me
VULNERABLE
Katie tells how she felt she was coping during filming, but first broke down just days after leaving the Street.
“I was so confused about what was wrong with me,” she says. “There was no reason for me to be so upset.
“I hadn’t been drinking, I wasn’t hungover and it wasn’t hormonal.
“But I got the role aged 19 and Sinead had become like a friend to me.
“She has been a big part of me throughout my adult life. She’s been inside of my head for seven years and my whole life was wrapped around her.
“I used to put on Sinead’s crazy shoes, and I would become her. I have grown up with her and I’m sad now she’s gone.
“I’m not the type to cry normally. I’m not heartless but my friends have joked in the past that I had a heart of stone because I don’t cry about much.
“I put it down to growing up in a Northern household where you’d get the mickey taken out of you if you cry over a sad film or whatever.
“But I suddenly felt very vulnerable. It came as a shock and I thought, ‘I’d better do something about this’.” A friend gave her the name of a counsellor and she has since had three weekly sessions. “The first time we just talked about why I was so upset, while the second meeting was about getting to the crux of the problem,” she says.
“I told her I couldn’t understand what was up. The counsellor told me, ‘Katie, you are grieving for Sinead’.
“I hadn’t realised what was happening at the time but it made sense when she said it. She said I’d got so good at differentiating myself from Sinead that she had become like a friend to me.
“In my third session, we talked about ways that I could improve the way I felt by looking after myself, going to the gym more and taking long walks. I told my friends and family how I wasn’t feeling myself, although I think they knew because I kept crying for no reason.
“My mum Ruth lives a few miles away