What struck Maxine Peake most about Anne Williams was her unwavering resilience.
The Shameless actress wanted to say 'yes' to taking on the role of the inspirational Hillsborough campaigner before she had even read the script of ITV drama Anne.
"She never gave up. There's times where maybe she felt like it but she continued on," said Maxine on This Morning this week.
"She never got bitter. She was angry but she channeled her anger and that's what drove her forward. She was very dignified with it.
"She famously said, 'They're trying to grind me down, but I'll grind them down first'."
Anne came to an emotional end on Wednesday night, but Maxine will be back on our screens tonight in companion film The Real Anne: Unfinished Business.
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Anne tragically lost her 15-year-old son Kevin on that fateful day in Sheffield in April 1989.
Kevin went with a friend to see his beloved Liverpool FC play in the FA Cup semi-final against Nottingham Forest but he never returned home.
The fatal decision to open an exit gate by the Leppings Lane turnstiles led to a crush in the central pen which claimed the lives of 97 people, including Kevin.
Anne and her husband Steve were led to a room full of polaroid's and asked to identify their son from among the faces of the dead.
The grieving mother spent years trying to get justice for her son after an overall verdict of accidental death, even tutoring herself to become a legal and medical expert to fight the Establishment.
Tragically, Anne died in 2013 just three years before the inquest that ruled that the Hillsborough victims had been unlawfully killed.
Maxine hopes the drama shows the power of standing up in "solidarity" against the establishment and that "the little person can take them on".
Admitting she didn't want to "do an impression" of of the Hillsborough campaigner, the actress said: "I thought, all I can do is get a sense of Anne and her fight for justice and her warmth and her humanity."
They filmed around streets of Liverpool with cast of local actors - with Maxine revealing many actors got in touch asking if they could be involved when she was announced in the role.
"Because of Anne's story and what it meant. It's part of our sporting history but also our history as a nation and our working class history in that respect," she said.
When asked about the pressure she had playing Anne, Maxine explained: "I still remember when I got the part. I was at Manchester Airport. There were a lot of football supporters with Liverpool shirts on getting on the plane. It hits.
"It was just seeing those people and thinking the responsibility. It does means so much. People say it happened so long ago but the reverberations go on. The trauma goes down through generations."
The cast of Anne worked closely with her loved ones, including Outlander actor Stephen Walters, who played Anne's husband Steve Williams.
The actor explained that no question was out of bounds when talking to the real Steve about Kevin and his relationship with Anne.
They even got so close that Steve gave the actor a tobacco tin which belonged to Anne, which he in turn gave to co-star Maxine.
"It was a little tobacco tin that she kept her rollies in and it had a marijuana leaf in Jamaican colours," said Maxine.
"Stuff like that, because Anne had obviously passed away, when you've got the person you're playing's tin is priceless.
"I met Steve Kelly, whose brother had died at Hillsborough, came when we were at Anfield and he said the last time I saw Anne she said get us a ciggy out of my tin.
"And I said, 'oh this tin' and he just burst into tears. Because she meant so much to so many people.
"It wasn't just about Kevin it was about the rest of the victims and the survivors."
Mr Kelly met Maxine while filming a scene at Liverpool's stadium and said she captured Anne "perfectly".
"She reminds me of some of the best people who helped us in our campaign, the way she really understood why we fought, she has a real social conscience," he said.
Maxine has also received praise from Anne's daughter, Sara Williams, who was just 10 when her brother died at Hillsborough.
While she knew Maxine would do a "really good job" of playing their mum she was stunned by how good her performance turned out to be in the drama named after her mother.
"When we went to see the final version I thought, how can someone play my mum and feel like my mum? At first, you watch it thinking, ‘she looks a bit like her’. But by the end, I felt I was watching Mum," said Sara.
The actress is still in touch with Sara and went to Formby for her daughter's 21st birthday party, where she was pleased to see a lot of survivors.
Sara, who also praised Stephen Walters for his portrayal of her dad, Steve, said it was important to show how much the families suffered.
She added: "It was difficult [to watch] but a relief, in a way, that people could see it wasn’t just the people who died at Hillsborough and wasn’t just the campaign. Families were destroyed. Brothers and sisters’ lives destroyed."
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