Why I told my mother's secret story of passion and heartbreak

It wasn't that she was turning a story she promised to keep secret into small screen drama likely to be watched by at least a couple of million viewers. It wasn't even that she had taken what many thought of as a big risk by casting Billie Piper as a young mother in the 1950s with a Yorkshire accent. No, the niggling feeling had more to do with geography.

Since her career took off with the groundbreaking Band of Gold back in the 1990s, Kay has not only set most of her dramas in the North, she has also made a point of filming them in her home city of Leeds. Unfortunately, for her latest two-part drama, A Passionate Woman, she was forced to go a little further afield.

"It's set half a century ago and we had a real problem finding streets that looked like they were from that time," she says. "There are too many lamp posts around spoiling the view, so some of the scenes were filmed in Bradford and Ilkley. To me, that's going a long way from home.

"Some people are surprised that I've managed to film everything here, but it's really not that difficult. Whenever I get the go ahead for a new project, I just say, 'Obviously we'll be shooting in Leeds'. It really is a simple as that."

At 59, Kay is now an industry old-hand and with the likes of Fat

Friends and Playing the Field under her belt, her self-confidence has been well-earned. However, it wasn't always that way. At 16, she found herself pregnant to a boy she had only just met. The wedding was hastily arranged and most who attended the small ceremony in Leeds registry office could have been forgiven for thinking the relationship was doomed.

Her first child, Yvonne, was born while Kay was living with her in-laws. Her new husband Anthony took on whatever work he could and, three years later, a second daughter, Gaynor, arrived. In those early days, there was little money to go around, but when the couple finally got

their own place and life settled into a routine, Kay decided to return to education and went on to study drama at Bretton Hall College.

The rest is history. Kay and Anthony have now been married for 40 years. Yvonne is now a successful producer who worked with her mother on A Passionate Woman and, while actress Gaynor was not a part of the cast, work has often been very much a family affair.

Looking back at the highs and lows of her own life, it's easy to see where Kay's taste for the dramatic comes. However, when her latest work is screened next weekend, it will be the life of her late mother which viewers will see played out.

The seeds of A Passionate Woman were sown one day in the late 1980s. At the time, Kay was just starting out as a writer and over a bowl of

washing up, her mother, Dinah, told her a secret she had carried with her for 30 years.

"I'd gone round to her house as I did every week," says Kay. "I'd had a row with Anthony. It was nothing major, but when she saw I was upset, she began telling me a story of how she and my dad used to row all the time."

The marital arguments were hardly a revelation. Kay's father had left when she was just a toddler and she was already aware the brief

marriage had been far from happy.

"Suddenly, I heard my mother say that when I was a baby, she he had 'this thing' with a man who lived in the flat below. I remember thinking what does she mean, 'thing'. Once she'd started she couldn't stop. She was sobbing into the sink telling me about the man she had fallen in love with.

"He was from Eastern Europe. Like her, he was married, although my mum always said she was a 'brash sort'. It wasn't planned, but they fell in love.

"No one can imagine their parents ever having sex, let alone having some kind of torrid affair. Even more so when it came to my mum. She was not that kind of woman. She only ever owned one lipstick."

The affair came to an abrupt end when Kay's mother and father were allocated a council house on the other side of the city. As a traditional 1950s housewife who didn't drive and who had to make her housekeeping go a long way, travelling to meet her lover was impossible. Not long afterwards, she heard the man who had ignited her passion had been stabbed to death in a fairground and spent the intervening years silently grieving when no one was looking.

"Their new house was only a few miles away, but it might as well have been another country. Just getting one of the big heavy pushchairs on to the bus was an ordeal and people didn't tend to go very far from their own front door.

"It's hard to imagine just how insular life was now, but you know we didn't have a telephone until way after I left home. When she heard about the stabbing, it must have been heartbreaking and all the more so because she could never tell anyone. I think that's why in the end she told me. She just wanted someone else to know."

Kay gave her word she would tell no one else about the affair, but for the burgeoning dramatist inside the dutiful daughter it was a promise she couldn't quite keep. Her mother's story became A Passionate Woman, which premiered at the West Yorkshire Playhouse in Leeds in 1992. The play was one of Kay's many collaboration with the theatre's then

artistic director Jude Kelly and for her mother it provided the release she had spent her life searching for.

"I knew my mother wasn't alone and I just felt if I could tell her story, it would ring a bell with so many women who for whatever reason had felt unfulfilled by life," she says. "Also, the very fact I'd promised her I wouldn't do something made me want to do it.

"Everything fell into place when my younger brother got married. She

was distraught and I knew part of the reason was she was remembering her loss from all those years ago. From then on I knew I had the beginning, middle and the end.

"When she first saw the play, she just thought it was a lovely story. She had no idea it was about her. The next time she saw it the penny dropped and she turned to me and said, 'This is about me, isn't it?'

"I told her it was, but no one else need ever know. After that performance there was a q&a session and a journalist asked about the inspiration for the play. I said that yes it was based on a true story, but I couldn't tell them whose. All of a sudden a hand popped up and I heard my mother saying, 'It's me, it's my story'. In that moment all the shame and secrecy of the previous 30 years lifted."

Kay's mother sadly isn't around to see A Passionate Woman's

reincarnation as Betty in the BBC drama starring Sue Johnston and Billie Piper as her older and younger self. Dinah died four years ago and Kay readily admits the film was her way of "bringing her back a little bit".

"There were sometimes on set when I would glance at Sue and think, 'Oh my God she has become mum'," she says. "She had exactly the same mannerisms and for no reason at all one morning she arrived, gave me a big hug and said, 'You know, I love you'. She couldn't explain why and was a bit embarrassed, but it was lovely, that's just what mum would have done.

"I'd worked with Sue before so I knew she would be great, but we struggled at first to cast the young Betty. We auditioned lots of actresses, but none of them were quite right and then someone told me Billie Piper was interested in the part.

"We arranged a meeting and the minute she stepped into the room I knew we had our lead. She just blew me away. The accent, the look,

everything was perfect and she never once put a foot wrong."

With Yorkshire having provided the backdrop for the hit ITV series Married, Single Other as well as the BBC's recent ratings winner Five Days, A Passionate Woman should be yet another good advert for the region's film and TV industry.

"Sometimes we don't shout enough about the talent we have," says Kay. "But it's definitely here and we should be proud of the work we have produced."

Certainly her mother would be.

n A Passionate Woman, BBC1, Sunday, April 11 and 18, 9pm.