Doing things our way: Jane Horrocks Photo: Andrew Crowley
For an actress of such petite stature, Jane Horrocks likes to overdo it at the top. «Ab Fab, it was larger than life, but it still resonated with people,» she says of Jennifer Saunders' excellent 1990s comedy series, which memorably starred Horrocks as the incongruous assistant Bubble, invariably dressed like something from a Christmas tree.
“But there won’t be such a comedy anymore. You won't see big character sketches like The Catherine Tate Show or The Fast Show. Nowadays, such a comedy is considered a bit crude. Now the tradition is to downplay everything. It's all about cool irony.»
Cold-blooded irony is not a style one readily associates with Horrocks. She's all about caricatures, those «big, concrete characters you can get your fill of,» as she calls them. This Christmas she can be seen in two such huge examples: as the voice of the guileless Babs in the sequel to Aardman's 2000 animated hit Chicken Little and as the hatchet-faced village butcher Annette in Blood Is Actually Christmas. specially for the Johnny Vegas series They Hope to Kill.
“It has a beginning, middle and end,” she says almost proudly of the wacky League of Gentlemen and Wickerman-style skit in which newlyweds Terry and Gemma are reluctantly drawn into a fight. the case of a serial killer who was apparently intent on eliminating every Santa Claus contestant in a close-knit rural community.
Starring a host of reliable mid-level comic talent, including Anita Dobson and Lee Mack, it's the TV equivalent of cozy crime with a generous dose of brandy-sized English silliness. “It probably sounds a little old-fashioned. But that's the type of comedy I respond to.»
Larger than life: Horrocks as Bubbles (center) in Ab Fab Photo: Alamy
Horrocks, 59, doesn't care about fashion. It was not for her that her career was built on awards, magazine covers and audience ratings. For someone with such bankable comic talent, many of her decisions over the last few years have been decidedly personal, unnoticed and of her own making. 2016 had “If You Kiss Me, Kiss Me,” a piece in which Horrocks performed her favorite new wave covers; Cotton Scare!, a show about the Lancashire cotton industry at the 2017 Manchester International Festival; and Love Pants, a 2022 Radio 4 drama she created about her late 1980s relationship with singer Ian Drury.
“I like the niche,” she says. “A lot of attention is paid to a successful project that attracts a certain number of likes or something like that. There are young people working in the industry now – they need to have so many followers to get a job.”
Horrocks and I meet in a cafe in Brighton, where she now lives after the end of her twenty-year relationship with the writer Nick Vivian, with whom she has two adult children. She looks exactly the same as always: high cheekbones, mischievous eyes, blonde, pixie haircut. And of course she sounds exactly the same — that soft Lancashire sound, as wide and warm as ever. This voice is both her capital and her USP. “I like to hide behind a voice, behind a personality,” she says. Even plastic chickens. “I do think voices in animation can be a little boring these days, you can't really see who the character is. It seems like studios want big names in animation just for the sake of animation.»
Horrocks as Nicola in Mike Leigh's Life sweet.» Photo: Alamy
I told Horrocks she has a big name too, although she objects. “I never saw myself like this,” she says. However, 25 years ago she was on the cusp of Hollywood stardom. After graduating from RADA in 1985, where her contemporaries included Imogen Stubbs and Ralph Fiennes, and after a short stint at the RSC, she achieved early success as the aggressive, bulimic Nicola in Mike Leigh's 1990 film Life is Sweet. Then in 1992 came The Rise and Fall of Little Voice, about a recluse with an extraordinary singing voice, written for her by Jim Cartwright after he heard Horrocks sing Judy Garland during rehearsals for his previous play, The Road, and which became a West End hit.
What was it like to be starring in a West End show built entirely around her? «I was terribly worried when he suggested it — I'm not a professional singer,» says Horrocks, who as a child was known to actually sing Barbra Streisand in her bedroom, although she's keen to point out that she also immersed herself in music as a teenager . Burnley's new romantic club scene. “During rehearsals, I could only sing if I hid behind a column.”
In 1998, Cartwright turned the play into a critically acclaimed film, and Horrocks, by then a celebrity following the success of Ab Fab, found herself in America enduring «a series of promotional interviews in which everyone asked the same thing.» I didn't like it very much.» She was also pregnant with her daughter, her son was only 18 months old, and rather than stay in Los Angeles to capitalize on her success, she returned home.
She doesn't regret it. «I always thought Hollywood would be a pretty lonely place.» She also believes that she would never fit the Hollywood mold. “I don’t do sexuality. And at RADA it was almost frowned upon to think of yourself as a character actor. But I knew that I would never become the main character. Back then you had to be beautiful to be like that. Now I'm grateful. Because some of the beautiful women I knew at RADA and RSC, once their looks start to fade, they could end up in the scrap heap. For an actress this can be very difficult.”
Her life was one long story in which she never did what she expected. For example, it was not common for a village girl from Lancashire to dream of becoming an actress. “There was an expectation in society that you would find a job in the valley. But I always thought there was something for me outside of Lancashire.” In RADA this was not done in order to maintain a regional accent. “If I had turned it down, I could have gotten more major roles, but I always turned it down. It's part of me.»
Throughout her career, her choices have been unmistakably unpredictable. In 1995, she starred as Lady Macbeth opposite Mark Rylance in a production notable for having Horrocks urinate live on stage every night. In 2018, she made a surprise appearance as Regan opposite Glenda Jackson in Deborah Warner's King Lear. (And fondly remembers eating Hoola Hoops and drinking wine every night in her dressing room with Jackson, who died in June of this year.)
In 2022, she appeared, quite atypically, as an upper-class English expat in Christopher Hampton's colonial-era drama The Capture of Singapore. Every time she finds herself stuck in a dead end, she moves in a different direction. “I was offered a role the other day that was a bit like Bubble. But I don’t want to do this at 59 years old.”
She believes that the number of roles for women her age is limited. “There are some actresses who are really doing well. But so many talented women my age get stuck being moms.”
Certainly not Horrocks — not least because in her youth she was offered many fragile single mum types because of her looks, and she abruptly turned them down. She will be seen on stage again early next year in a yet-to-be-announced new play.
All she will say about the role is this. “The director said that I could play both a femme fatale and an eccentric. And I practically screamed, “Weirdo!”
In fact, Blood: A Murder They Hope Mystery will air on Gold on December 16; Chicken Run: Dawn of the Nugget will be released on Netflix on December 15
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