"I'm not shuffling off": Street star Cleaver opens a new life-chapter

“I feel like I’ve still got a lot to give, and I want adventures. I’m not going to let fear hold me back, and I’m not going to let society hold me back either – absolutely not. I want to forge my own path, and I encourage all women to do the same.

“Are there areas of my life that could be improved? Of course. Is every day a great day? Of course not. But I know where I’m going, and I’m alright. I quite like myself now. I don’t feel I need to hide certain parts of me.”

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This is all new territory for Cleaver, who has played no-nonsense Eileen Grimshaw on ITV’s long-running soap Corrie since 2000. Earlier this year, she took a break from the cobbles to star in a musical touring production of Sister Act – it was the first time she’d been on stage in 25 years and was riddled with nerves. “But it was fabulous,” Cleaver beams. “I’m scared – so what? I could have wound myself up and talked myself out of it in the past, going, ‘Oh no – what if, what if, what if?’ But I don’t listen to those voices any more.”

For most of her life, Cleaver grappled with self-doubt, often feeling ‘other’ and that she didn’t really ‘belong’ – and it’s only in the last two years that this has changed.

Cleaver, who has a grown-up son, Elliot Quinn, with her ex-husband James Quinn, peels back the layers on how she reached this point in her new book, A Work In Progress, which she describes as part memoir, part “manifesto for women”.

It starts at the very beginning, when Cleaver was adopted as a newborn from a north London hospital. She recalls a ‘wonderful childhood’ with loving parents – the family moved locations a few times, including a spell in Scotland before settling in Manchester.

But as Cleaver writes in the book: ‘Despite the fact that I was never made to feel lesser in any way by my loving family, not knowing who I was or where I came from added another layer of uncertainty about myself, which has underlined my life for as long as I can remember, until relatively recently.’

It was her stint on I’m A Celebrity… Get Me Out Of Here! in 2022 that triggered her to really start letting go of the negative self-beliefs she’d been carrying. Although Cleaver had already started having therapy in her mid-40s, sharing her story publicly turned out to be a key step.

“When you’ve got 24 hours to fill and a campfire and nothing else, you forget the cameras are there – I completely forgot that and then I opened up, whereas I’ve never spoken about that before. And that was the start of it.”

A Work In Progress by Sue Cleaver is published in hardback by Bloomsbury Publishing, priced £20. Available now