There’s something magic about live performance...
SHE HAS won two Olivier Awards for her stage craft, appeared in a raft of television comedies and delighted millions in the multi-award winning British film Four Weddings & A Funeral. Yet for some people, Sara Crowe will always be “the cheese girl”. And frankly, my dears, she doesn’t give Edam.
“I still get called that to this day!” says the Ayrshire-born actress who found fame in the fondly remembered Philadelphia cheese TV adverts of the late 80s and 90s.
“I am the cheese girl! I love the word ‘girl’ now, it makes me feel young,” chuckles Sara, who turns 56 on Tuesday. “Technically I’m the cheese lady…”
Others know her best as Laura, the first bride in Four Weddings; and then there are people, okay mostly men, who remember her vividly as Fatima, the alluring belly-dancer in 1992’s Carry On Columbus.
“I enjoyed that belly dance,” Sara laughs.
“It was quite difficult, though. I had to do four workshops just for that little scene. The film was such fun to do. I’d grown up with the Carry Ons, they were great. There was an innocence about them – it’s not the same in comedy now.”
She finds fame odd. “Sometimes people talk about me as if I’m deaf. You hear them say, ‘Is she on our flight?’ ‘Where’s she sitting?’ ”
The cheese ads kick-started her screen career – and revitalised her bank balance. “Doing that commercial for a week paid as much as doing theatre for a year.”
But behind the ditzy comedy blonde lurks a seriously accomplished actress.
Crowe has starred in Alan Ayckbourn’s Absurd Person Singular, Somerset Maugham’s The Constant Wife and Noel Coward’s Private Lives – her performance as honeymooner Sybil won her her first Olivier. “My big love is theatre,” Sara says. “There’s something magical about live performance and the interaction with the audience. The adrenalin flows…”
She can currently be seen as Fay in Tim Firth’s touring play Sheila’s Island, with Judy Flynn, Abigail Thaw and Rina Fatania as four women on a team-building weekend who get stranded in the Lake District. “It’s very funny – it asks what you’d do if you were stranded on an island and the results aren’t pretty. It’s about survival and the worst traits come to the fore.”
Firth adapted it from his hit play Neville’s Island – replacing middle-management men with middle-management women. “He didn’t change an awful lot. The emotions and situation are the same. Fay is the equivalent of Martin Clunes’s Roy.” It’s Crowe’s first theatrical tour since Covid. “A job got cancelled and I was thrown into a void,” she recalls. “I thought, ‘Okay I’ll learn Italian and bake cakes.’ Of course, I didn’t do any of that.”
Instead she wrote a comic adaptation of Conan Doyle’s The Hound Of The Baskervilles, which played to socially-distanced audiences last summer. She and actor Stefan Bednarczyk played all the parts. “It went very well; it was very funny. We needed a laugh back then – we still do!”
Laughter was a staple part of Sara’s early years. Her parents left Scotland when she was four because her father Allen had to move around for work. The family – she has two older sisters – finally settled in Guildford, Surrey. “We used to watch television together, the Gen Game with Bruce and Anthea, Dave Allen, Dick Emery, Some Mothers Do ’Ave ’Em, Dad’s Army…”
She made her stage debut at 14, at the Yvonne Arnaud Theatre, Guildford. “I played a bordello girl. I didn’t know what a bordello girl was, but I loved the glamorous costumes.
“I remember thinking this is a wonderful thing to do – imagine if this were a job, if somebody paid me to do this.” School was “very strict – running in the corridor was a capital offence”, so at 16 she started drama school and, after graduating, formed comedy double act the Flaming Hamsters with school pal Ann Bryson. “We did it first at the Edinburgh Festival and then tried it out alfresco in Covent Garden in the mid-1980s – and in pubs and clubs – it was much scarier than acting.”
THEIR CHEMISTRY and comic delivery landed them the Philadelphia ads, playing ditzy friends with an unhealthy craving for cream cheese in a string of silly commercials on our screens for a decade.
TV comedies followed, including Now Something Else, The Rory Bremner Show, Hot Metal, Haggard, Alas Smith & Jones and ITV sitcom Sometime, Never.
But all were overshadowed by Four Weddings. “It was the best job ever, like going to a wedding that lasted all summer – and getting paid for it. People said that my dress was awful, but I
I remember thinking, this is a wonderful thing to do, imagine if this were a job, if somebody paid me to do this...
liked it! I must have terrible taste.” And she adds: “None of us knew it would be so big.”
Twice-married Sara met her first husband, actor Toby Dale – son of Jim – on the set of Carry On Columbus and wed a month later.
They divorced in 1998 and she has been happily married to comedy writer Sean Carson – nephew of the great Frank – since 2003.
They live in a Surrey village close to her 96-year-old father and older sisters.
Her mother Neta died in 2004 and Sara helped to look after her dad during lockdown.
“He was a chemical engineer for Shell – he’s a very clever man. He can tell you how to get uranium out of the ground but he can’t tell you how to change the bedsheets.”
Crowe has a wonderfully sharp brain too.
She published her heart-warming debut novel Campari For Breakfast in 2014 – “it’s still on sale!” – and the sequel, Martini Henry, in 2018.
“I’m working on the third one but it’s hard to get quality time to write,” she says, especially with the stage in her blood.
Her all-time favourite jobs include Acorn Antiques the Musical. “I was a huge fan of Victoria
Wood and I’d grown up pretending I was a pop star, singing into a deodorant in the bathroom.”
Unplanned stage incidents most tickle her fancy. “In 12th Night at The Playhouse, there’s a scene near the end where Sebastian and Violet get together and everyone is on stage.
“The soldiers are there in helmets, it’s very dramatic, and right at the pinnacle of the big scene Lionel Guyett’s helmet fell off and rolled down the stage… it completely shattered the illusion.”
LESS FUNNY was the afternoon she tore her calf muscle playing evil Madame Woo in Cinderella at the Lyric Theatre in 2015. “It was a chase scene; I had to go off-stage, sprint down two flights, up two flights, and back onstage,” she recalls.
“In a matinee performance I managed to tear the calf muscle and the Achilles tendon of my left leg. It was agonising but there was no understudy so I finished it using a stick. I did the evening show in a wheelchair. But the next day, I couldn’t walk so they had to recast my role.”
TV parts continued into the Noughties – she appeared in Doctors, Midsomer Murders, Skins and played Shelia Morris in Eastenders – but artistically Sara has made more impact treading the boards.
Off work, she loves taking long walks through the stunning Surrey Hills with her dog, Nelly – “she’s a bit of everything part collie, part spaniel, part whippet, part cat, part fox…”
She also enjoys “bluegrass, Dolly Parton, old country music…my dad goes to bed with bagpipes blaring out. Amazing Grace on the bagpipes is so rousing, it gets me every time.
“I’m quite a hermit, I like nesting. I love reading and writing too. I’ve been writing since before I wanted to act. As a child, I was quite selfcontained. After this tour I’m going to work on the book, and there are theatre possibilities for next year… if they happen.
“You have to say that now, don’t you?
● Sheila’s Island is touring now. For dates and tickets see yvonne-arnaud.co.uk/touring