RTS Programme Awards 2023

Sarah Lancashire first caught the nation’s attention on the evening of 25th January 1991, the night that Raquel Wolstenhulme made her earliest appearance in Coronation Street. Raquel was a checkout assistant in Weatherfield’s local supermarket, but such was her impact in the show that before long Raquel had become a barmaid and was pulling pints of Newton and Ridleys in the legendary Rovers Return.

In many ways Coronation Street was the perfect beginning for Sarah’s career on television. She grew up just a few miles away from Granada’s studios, and after training at London’s Guildhall School of Music and Drama she returned to live and work in the North, teaching at Salford University between theatre jobs. She knew the North – she knew its people, its speech rhythms. And she brought all of that to Raquel. As a foretaste of what was to come later in Sarah’s career, in Raquel she created a character that transcended the image of the bottle-blonde barmaid – she gave the audience someone they really believed in, had empathy with, and felt they knew. She made Raquel complex. She made her a real person.

Little wonder then that on the night of Raquel’s last appearance in Coronation Street, twenty million viewers tuned in. They’d fallen in love with Sarah’s performance. It was the
first sign of a special relationship that would develop between Sarah and the viewing audience – one in which they felt deep affection and respect for her work. Three decades on, it’s stronger than ever.

Sarah has said to me on a number of occasions that she never ever watches her own performances. She must be the only person left in the country who doesn’t!

Sarah followed Coronation Street with three seasons of the Sunday night series Where The Heart Is, and then took on a great variety of roles in some of the most popular dramas on television. She starred opposite John Thaw in The Glass, and alongside Billy Connolly in Gentleman’s Relish; there was Clocking Off, Seeing Red, The Rotters’ Club, and Rose and Maloney. There was classic period drama too – Sons and Lovers, Oliver Twist and Wuthering Heights.

Sarah was strongly attracted to contemporary roles that really challenged her as an actor, parts which pushed her into difficult places – including real life roles, like that of Rosemary Nicholls, mother of one of the Ipswich serial murder victims…or Angela Cannings, who was wrongfully convicted of killing her two baby sons. Another challenging role came in 2018 in Jack Thorne’s Kiri, in which Sarah played Miriam, the disorganised social worker for a girl who is abducted and murdered. Difficult characters to play, difficult places to inhabit.

In 2012 came the first series of Last Tango In Halifax, in which Sarah played Caroline – the school headteacher in a same-sex relationship with fellow teacher Kate, and a role for which Sarah won major critical acclaim. Her performance was all about Caroline’s humanity which ensured the character truly resonated with viewers. Last Tango was also Sarah’s first work to be written by Sally Wainwright. They would go on to collaborate on the amazing Happy Valley, which Sally wrote specifically for her…the perfect alchemy of the right character for the right actor from the right creator.

Happy Valley has gone on to become a colossal hit and that rarest of beasts these days – a show we wait for so eagerly we actually watch it at the time it transmits. In police sergeant Catherine Cawood, Sarah’s given us one of the defining characters of contradictory psychological complexity for our times. Love and guilt, despair and pain, weakness and courage – it’s all there in Catherine’s character, all beautifully realised in Sarah’s performance.

And then most recently came Julia, HBO’s mini-series about America’s pioneering TV chef Julia Child, and a world as far away from Happy Valley as it’s possible to get. So total was Sarah’s transformation into Julia Child, it was impossible to believe this was the same actor we’d just watched laying down the law in the bleak landscapes of West Yorkshire. But that’s what Sarah does. She inhabits each character she plays with utter integrity. She takes the audience into that character’s reality and shows them the world from the character’s point of view.

And she does it supremely well, not only with outstanding talent and intelligence, but also with total commitment and dedication. She’s the consummate screen actor, the real deal. What a privilege it’s been for us all to watch her performances on television over the decades.