Why Sheridan Smith is a star cut from a different cloth
Tonight, Sheridan Smith will appear in a TV special that showcases her very particular talents. Sheridan is a mixture of showbiz chat (presided over, somewhat incongruously, by Alexander Armstrong) and showtunes, many of which appear on her new album.
The programme feels like validation for the 36-year-old actress. Following an unnecessary amount of media vituperation last year in which she was accused, among other things, of being drunk on stage, she withdrew from the public eye and threw herself into the UK tour of Funny Girl in which she played, sublimely, the Ziegfield Follies star Fanny Brice.
The moral opprobrium was a very British phenomenon. Until last year, Smith was the type of personality that both the public and the media love – funny, sweet, a bit vulnerable, the sort of person you could have a gossip with while queuing for doughnuts at Greggs. So when she accused Funny
Girl’s producers, in a tweet, of pressurising her, the press rubbed their hands. Had this girl next door from Doncaster got too big for her boots? The same papers that had built her up now stood gleefully poised to take her down.
But the demonisation of Sheridan Smith failed to properly acknowledge what was happening behind the scenes. Her father, to whom she was incredibly close, was dying of cancer and she was struggling with mental health problems. A self-confessed workaholic up until this point, Smith was clearly running on empty. In
Sheridan, she now refers to last year as “my massive meltdown”.
Comments such as this are what endear Smith to the public. In an age of blandly presentable actors speaking platitudes about their colleagues, there is something admirably old-fashioned about her refusal to play the game. Smith wears her heart on her sleeve in a way that recalls Barbara Windsor or even Judy Garland, almost using her audience as her confidantes. When asked by Armstrong what sort of man she’s looking for, she replies: “Someone who’ll put up with me, ’cos I’m a bit of a handful.”
The new album – Sheridan – shows that Smith is old-fashioned in another way. Several of the numbers are torch songs – Don’t Rain on My Parade, Anyone Who Had a Heart
– stories of thwarted romance and unrequited yearnings that hark back to a time when female vocalists unashamedly expressed their vulnerability. The album is not, in any way, a form of empowerment.
On Sheridan, she actually starts wiping the tears from her eyes while performing and this, I think, is key to Smith’s appeal as an actress. Her emotions always seem incredibly close to the surface. This has served her well in a number of TV roles: as the misused wife of one of the Great Train robbers in Mrs Biggs, as the terminally ill Lisa Lynch in The C Word and as a young Cilla Black, determined to become a major star despite only a modicum of talent in Jeff Pope’s terrific drama.
But she is equally powerful on stage – not only in the musical theatre roles for which she is adored, but in the classics too, notably as Hedda Gabler in which she caught, almost unbearably, the all-consuming despair of Ibsen’s anti-heroine, crushed by the sexual blackmail of a treacherous family friend. There was also the splendid revival of Terence Rattigan’s
Flare Path, in which she played a former barmaid who has inadvertently become a countess on account of her marriage to a Polish pilot. Her co-star, Sienna Miller, bemoaned the fact that acting opposite Smith was not terribly healthy for the ego.
That Smith has achieved a career in both classic and contemporary roles is unusual, partly because of a certain snobbery that now pervades the industry. Smith is not posh. She didn’t attend a smart drama school, she once had a job selling burgers to bikers in a van off the motorway and, while her parents were in the entertainment business, it was on the Northern club circuit, as a countryand-western double act. Certainly, she has played an inordinate amount of “chav” roles, but she is one of the few young working-class actresses in Britain who has succeeded in crossing class boundaries – playing posh with as much conviction as she plays common.
Sheridan is not a wonderful piece of television, and one wonders whether the actress would have agreed to do it had she not had an album to promote. She looks nervous throughout, as if she has suddenly realised she is not quite ready to return to the spotlight, to portray herself as a survivor.
Yet there is no doubt that survive she will. Smith’s is a major talent but, more importantly, she’s an unusual one. The press can carp all they like – the public have made up their own minds.
Sheridan is on ITV tonight at 8pm
‘Smith is not posh. She didn’t attend a smart drama school and she once had a job selling burgers to bikers in a van off the motorway’