How Sue struggled to play the part of an ideal daughter to her mother’s script

Sue Johnston has become one of our best loved actresses, but she could never please her mother. She talks to Sheena Hastings.

SUE Johnston’s mother Margaret had been in decline for a few years. Sue would make her way up the M6 to Warrington to see her mum as often as she could, and when it looked as though the end was nigh Margaret suddenly rallied on seeing her only child.

The habits of a lifetime could not be denied: “What have you come as? You look like a bus conductress.” This was a classic put-down when Sue was young, as bus conductresses generally wore thick pan-stick make-up. Never mind that her daughter had rushed straight from filming Waking The Dead, make-up still on, and straight on to the motorway.

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Throughout her life Sue had been the victim of her mother’s tongue. Her looks, clothes and friends were prime targets, and later her career choice was a long-running bone of contention.

“I can laugh about it now,” says Sue, “but I used to come away steaming with stress. She’d really put the knife in. I remember when she said, ‘What happened to your lips? You used to have lovely lips, but they’re all thin now’. I said, ‘That’s what happens when you get older’ and she said, ‘Well, mine didn’t go thin’. She thought that because she was my mother she had a right to criticise. Another of her great favourites was, ‘You haven’t looked decent since I stopped dressing you’, and she meant it.”

This griping about her now-departed mum might seem slightly harsh to some, but many people (particularly women) who have never felt they measured up to their mother’s expectations will empathise with Sue. She fulfilled her dreams, became a respected stage actress then television star (in such family favourites as Brookside, The Royle Family, Jam and Jerusalem and Waking The Dead), earned good money and made a great home for herself and her son Joel – but always in the background was the niggling dissatisfaction that her mother never gave her seal of approval to her life choices and her many successes.

She could never understood why her mother could not say she loved her and was proud of her when she was alive, but feels she may be slightly closer to some understanding and forgiveness now, having re-examined her own life story for the memoir Things I Couldn’t Tell My Mother.

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“The strange thing is that my childhood was very happy, and I loved school and being near crowds of aunties, uncles and cousins. My mum was one of 14, so there was always a bunch of cousins to play with.”

Relations with Margaret became increasingly strained when Sue left school and began to work in an office, socialising at Liverpool’s Cavern club with the likes of “dirty Beatle” (Margaret’s words) Paul McCartney and other young musicians. When Sue gave up a steady job in the tax office to pursue her dream of acting, Margaret could feel that her daughter was slipping away.

“Looking back, some of her attitude was about not wanting me to get big-headed, wanting to keep my feet on the ground. When I left home at 21 to go to drama school in London she said, ‘My life is over now’. She said a lot of things without considering the consequences, but that left me feeling awful for her, and great guilt. She thought she was losing her child and how she used to control me. She wanted me to be at home, marry and present her with grandchildren who would live in the neighbourhood, too. At one point she told me she wished she’d never had me educated because it had driven a wedge between us.”

Leaving behind Webber Douglas drama school and securing her first theatre job, Sue married a fellow actor at 24, but the pair soon realised their mistake. Divorce hit her hard. “At 11 I was reading Pride and Prejudice, Wuthering Heights and Jane Eyre, featuring these glowering passionate men that I’ve been in search of ever since. The Brontës and Jane Austen have a lot to answer for – for years I thought you were defined by having a ring on your finger.”

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Not long after the marriage collapsed Sue began to suffer depression and started to diet, which soon escalated into an eating disorder. “It went from enjoying food to an obsession where I’d wake in the morning thinking, ‘What can I eat and how can I stave it off?’ I’d start craving pies and cakes and things I don’t normally eat, then I’d cheat on whatever diet I was on, and gorge on everything.”

Eventually she went to the doctor, who put her on antidepressants, and they did the trick for a long period, but bulimia was to trouble her for around 10 years. The depression returned after the end of her second marriage, to theatre director David Pammenter, when he left her with their young son and she was struggling as a single mum earning poor wages from work she nonetheless loved in Theatre in Education. Any self-confidence she felt disappeared.

Depression is a malevolent black presence, always stalking you, something you have to be forever on your guard against. It was like something was constantly on my shoulders, weighing me down.” She says she worried about talking about depression and bulimia in her book, but has had many letters thanking her for discussing these difficult themes.

The bulimia escalated when, at the age of 38, Sue got her big TV break on Brookside, where she played Scouse housewife Sheila Grant opposite Ricky Tomlinson (he would be her husband again in The Royle Family). “I loved the programme for almost all of the time I was on it, but you had to face up to what you looked like and the camera does put weight on you. People would comment on how I looked in the street, too. In theatre this kind of thing just doesn’t happen – you just express the character and put it out there, not thinking about how you look.” In the end, having covered up her eating disorder and depression for many years, Sue went to the doctor after a friend confided her own similar problems.

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Sue says she’ll always be grateful to Brookside for providing a secure job that put a roof over her son’s head and to her parents who, despite Sue’s fraught relationship with Margaret, came up trumps on the childcare front when Joel was very young. Sue left Brookside when her character began to become “a bit sanctimonious”.

Her colleague, and on-screen extra-marital love interest John McCardle left with her, and they hit the boards in a play together.

“Mum thought I was mad. I set my stall out as ‘no job too small’ and was lucky to get one-off parts in shows like Inspector Morse and A Touch of Frost.” Then came Caroline Aherne and Craig Cash’s The Royle Family, in which Sue played Barbara, the long-suffering wife to Ricky Tomlinson’s hilariously rude and intolerant Jim Royle. “They are all so funny and made me think, ‘God, I am so boring.’ But I loved every minute of it, and we used to sit on that sofa laughing and chatting ages after the director had finished with us.”

A Christmas Special will be recorded in November, and Sue can’t wait to see the gang again. In ten series of Waking the Dead, she says the lines scripted for her character forensic psychologist Grace Foley were sometimes almost beyond her ability to pronounce. “People would delight in trying to put me off... but I had the satisfaction of sitting in her office and thinking ‘look at all these books I’ve read. I must be very clever indeed’.”

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Sue, now 67, will soon be seen in a school gates drama called The Gates on Sky, and there’s another series for the BBC still under wraps. “I’d love to do Downton Abbey, with all those lovely frocks. But knowing my luck and with my face, I’d be put below stairs.” Happy as a new grandma, sharing a home in London with a friend, still very much in demand professionally, and maybe finally understanding her mother a little more, Sue Johnston sounds a contented woman. “I’ve had ups and downs like anyone, but I have been lucky. And, in spite of everything, I think I am pretty well-adjusted.”

Sue Johnston will be speaking at a Yorkshire Post Literary Lunch at Pavilions of Harrogate on September 22. Other speakers are Pam Ayres and Carol Ann Lee. Tickets from 07731 690163 oremail [email protected]

Things I Couldn’t Tell My Mother by Sue Johnston is published by Ebury Press, £18.99. To order from the Yorkshire Post Bookshop call 0800 0153232 or go to www.yorkshirepostbookshop.co.uk

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