From Catastrophe choirgirl to

Sharon Horgan on her latest role in the new Military Wives film, and why it’s a world away from the feisty TV characters she creates – and often plays...

‘My dad ran two pubs, and then a turkey farm’

No one who’s caught more than a passing glimpse of the uberneurotic Sharon, the character that writer and actress Sharon Horgan brought to life in TV’s Catastrophe, let alone the outrageous Donna from her earlier show Pulling, would ever call them easy to deal with. Entertaining to watch certainly, as a shelf groaning with awards for both shows can bear witness, but likeable? No way. Yet Sharon raises her eyebrows when I tell her she’s been described as the Queen Of Difficult Women. ‘Have I?’ she counters, looking alarmed. ‘That’s, erm, nice… I think?’

However, she’s about to soften up somewhat on the big screen in

Military Wives, a new film inspired by the story of the real-life Military Wives Choir. Back in 2010, a group of wives and girlfriends left in the UK while their partners were deployed in Afghanistan formed a choir. They originally did it for support and companionship, but with the help of TV choirmaster Gareth Malone it became a greater success than they could ever have dreamed, culminating in a performance at the Royal Albert Hall and a Christmas Number One single in Wherever You Are.

In the film — a sweet tale set on a UK military base and directed by Peter Cattaneo of The Full Monty fame — Sharon plays Lisa, the outspoken manager of the base’s convenience store who butts heads with buttoned-up colonel’s wife Kate (Kristin Scott Thomas). But with the emergence of the choir, along with some heartbreaking events that actually happened in real life, the two women put aside their differences and form a surprising friendship. An uplifting soundtrack, with soldiers’ wives learning how to pour out their hearts – and their fears for their loved ones – to the music of Cyndi Lauper and Sister Sledge, adds that spine-tingling warmth.

While Sharon did her own singing in the film, she admits she’s not a natural songbird. ‘It was fun for us to do, although I think Kristin wouldn’t mind me saying that neither of us are incredible singers. But it sort of didn’t matter because the real choir weren’t trained singers anyway. They were just ordinary women who came together to provide a sense of community while their husbands and partners were in Afghanistan. But they still managed to create a nice sound, so the story is more about how they managed to get to a place where they could do it, the difficulties that arose along the way and how they faced them. It’s really a film that is about female friendship.’

As for the character of Lisa, Sharon says that compared to her previous incarnations she’s a pussycat. ‘Lisa’s tough, so I guess in that way she’s like Sharon from

Catastrophe to a certain extent. But I’d say she’s more vulnerable than the characters I usually play. She has a teenage daughter and her partner’s away at war, so it’s about the difficulties of that and the strain it can put on the relationships. She’s certainly far removed from Donna, who was one of the most selfish people you could ever meet in the history of television!’

It was Donna, the leader of a pack of three badly behaved female flatmates in Pulling, who first brought Sharon to fame in 2006. ‘No one taught me to write characters like that,’ she shrugs. ‘I think it was purely a response to the fact that at that time there weren’t really any of them out there. When I started to write Pulling with Dennis Kelly, neither of us were interested in writing stories that were necessarily female or male. We just wanted to write something funny and true

about that time in your life where you’re living somewhere and you can see the party going on, but you’re never invited. The story was really about our misspent 20s and Donna could have been male as easily as female.

‘But we definitely wanted the women in the show to be the funny ones, not the girlfriend or the longsuffering, put-upon anything. We wanted them to have funny lines of their own. It’s the truth of who we are, and I’ve really no interest in writing anything that isn’t truthful.’

Sharon, born in London but raised in Ireland, says her parents — an Irish mother and a New Zealander father — knew their own minds too. ‘My dad moved to London to work on building the Underground, and then he met my mum, who was this gorgeous woman over from Ireland working as a teacher, and they decided to get married and have a family. They opened a pub in the East End of London, the proper East End, Kray twins territory. At one point when my sister and I were little, my dad was asked to provide an alibi for someone for something very serious and he thought, “Right, I’d better get these two little girls the hell out of here.”

‘So they moved back to Ireland and took on another pub. But after a while my mother decided she’d had enough of cleaning men’s toilets and watching my father drinking, so they gave up the pub and took the natural next step — turkey farming!’

Sharon lived on the Co Meath farm with her siblings Maria, Lorraine, Shane and Mark, and looks back on the time with a mixture of affection and bemusement. ‘It was a great spot to develop your tragicomic perspectives,’ she says. ‘It was incredibly stressful because turkey is not very popular outside Christmas, so Christmas — which is supposed to be a happy time of the year for most people — was just full of stress for us. My dad had to earn all our money for the entire year in a couple of weeks. The good thing was we’d be taken out of school to work on the farm, which was great. There was a horror to that time, but a magic to it too. To this day, most of the time I’m with my brothers and sisters is spent reliving our childhood Christmases.’

The Horgan siblings have not been held back by their unconventional childhood. Sister Lorraine is also an actress — she appeared in the first series of Peaky Blinders

— while brother Shane was an Irish rugby star until a knee injury forced