Sheridan Smith should be a monster. By showbiz rights, the actress who has bagged two Oliviers, a Bafta, an OBE and made Dustin Hoffman cry from sheer awe at her talent, should at least have a touch of bighead-itis. So many actors with fewer accolades become ludicrously grand given half the chance, but Smith seems immune to the luvvie side of the industry. For better or worse, her success never seems to sink in.
“Given that level of acclaim, it’s puzzling that she’s so down-to-earth,” says director Tanya Stephan, only half joking. “She never has to take herself down a level to talk to people. She’s just there – she is naturally warm.”
Stephan has tracked the last five months of Smith’s pregnancy for Sheridan Smith: Becoming Mum at 9pm. The actress, now 39, gave birth to her first child, a boy, in May this year. Her journey is an anxious, often heart-rending watch. “I was more confident when I first moved to London,” says Smith, quietly in tears at one point. “I was young and fearless and open. I wish I was still that girl.”
Smith was 16 when she left her job working in a burger van in Doncaster to star in a National Youth Music Theatre production of Bugsy Malone. She lived in a London houseshare of five girls, one of whom went off to join S Club 7; Smith was promptly signed up by an agent. “I couldn’t have afforded to go the drama school route,” she told the Sunday Times in 2017. “It had never crossed my mind. The agent got me an audition for Into the Woods at the Donmar, which I got. And Damian Lewis was my wolf.” From there she was off.
Smith’s stack of credits is staggering; in TV and theatre, be it acting, singing or narrating, her off button seems to be faulty. She arrived on British TV screens as Ralf Little’s girlfriend on The Royle Family in 1998. The two revived their partnership for Two Pints of Lager and a Packet of Crisps, which ran for almost a decade on the BBC, while Smith also starred in, among other things, Gavin and Stacey, Benidorm and Love Soup.
She had been performing in one way or another since she was six: her parents, Marilyn and Colin, played as a country and western duo called the Daltons, and “little Shezzy” would often nip on stage to join them. It was “a nice, working-class, northern family” she says on camera, one with lots of happy memories until her oldest brother Julian died of cancer at 18.
Talking about that period is one of many times Smith wobbles in the film, her raw, open vulnerability being part of what makes her compelling to watch. A “missing layer of skin” is how Anna Mackmin described it after she directed Smith to rave reviews as Hedda Gabler at the Old Vic in 2012. Smith’s emotions run close to the surface, nailing the “what you see is what you get” relatability that has drawn an army of loyal female fans, who always show up for her. A member of the Hedda Gabler cast was overheard complaining: “Oh God, it’s like playing Alton Towers.” But Smith routinely seems to outshine in her roles – on this point critics are agreed.
Her career turning point came with the West End adaptation of Legally Blonde. Smith played ditsy lawyer Elle Woods for two years in a production for which the Guardian hailed her “true star quality”, as the “the chief glory of the show” (The Telegraph) who “[achieved] stage stardom like some jaw-dropping hole-in-one in golf” (The Independent). But the bigger the job, the more she worried; Smith often pinpoints the decline of her mental health to her final week of the run, when she forgot her lines.
From there came ITV’s series Mrs Biggs, where she played the wife of Ronnie, the so-called great train robber. She was asked to wear a red beehive and speak received pronunciation (until then, Smith said she thought RP meant Right Posh). It was a swerve from playing what she affectionately once called a load of “old scrubs, chavs and slappers”.
Dustin Hoffman put her in his film Quartet alongside Maggie Smith and Michael Gambon. She shaved her head to play a cancer sufferer in The C Word. The anxiety and self-doubt grew.
She has insisted to interviewers over and over again that she didn’t understand why people put so much faith in her because she was “rubbish”, “an idiot” who was “blagging it”, and assumed every job might be her last. Her lack of confidence was considered endearing; after all, Smith was a right laugh. She could never be accused of boring on about “the craft” or not having enough to say. She always made good copy.
What she lacks in arrogance, she has made up for in personal drama. “With men, it’s considered rock’n’roll to be partying with girls every night,” she told one journalist. “When a woman does it, it becomes ‘Look at the state of her!’” She described the media as making her “feel like some trollop who’s on the shelf”.
Still, unable to contain herself in the parameters set by publicists, she spilled her guts on social media about boys and break-ups, having been in relationships with James Corden and Amy Winehouse’s ex, Reg Traviss. A spiral of booze and drugs was gleefully documented by sections of the press. Smith’s reputation was cemented.
“I couldn’t really cope with all the expectations on me,” she told the Daily Telegraph in 2019. “I felt stressed and anxious all the time. I was supposed to be a celebrity but I couldn’t do it right. I’d be told by publicists how to behave, and I’d forget and just say exactly what I thought. I drank pints and made rude jokes and was brilliant at saying the wrong things. And if I dressed myself I looked a mess, so I’d be constantly sending pictures of myself to stylists saying: ‘Is this all right?’ and being totally paranoid.”
In the middle of the last decade, Smith missed curtain calls for Funny Girl, and faced allegations that she was drunk on stage. Her father was diagnosed with cancer, and for a while the actress was seen as a hot mess. At the Baftas in 2016, Graham Norton made a joke about her alleged drinking problem. Humiliated, she posted a slew of regrettable drunk tweets. When Smith’s father died at the end of that year, the wheels fell off.
In Becoming Mum, Smith talks about locking herself into a hotel room and having a physical and mental breakdown. She was hospitalised after suffering several seizures, which she says were the result of being addicted to anti-anxiety tablets and making an abrupt attempt to stop taking them.
After she was discharged, a forced break from work followed. In that period, Smith got several tattoos – lotus flowers, a butterfly, diamonds on her hands, and a halo with wings in memory of her brother. “I just covered myself,” she told the Daily Telegraph. “I’ve got more down my sides and my legs. And now I’ve gone back to work. What an idiot.”
Later, she said: “The reason I got all these tattoos was because I thought no one was ever going to give me a job again… you are not meant to have body markings in the theatre. It was my way of self-destructing but giving myself a reason for it. My mum went berserk.”
In 2017 and 2018, she recorded two albums but cancelled her last live tour. Ticket sales were terrible; Smith’s manager cited a heavy workload. Eventually, Smith left London and moved to the countryside with her fiance Jamie Horn who, in no-nonsense Smith fashion, she met on Tinder at the height of her fame.
“I’m responsible for the craziness, but hopeful for the future,” she says in the documentary, which tracks the mental health of mothers, including her own. Smith sees being a mum as “a second chance”, and is intent on “staying in a good place for the baby”.
Horn and the couple’s menagerie of dogs and donkeys are on hand for support, and their life together looks calm and settled. Work is constant. Smith’s recent episode of ITV’s lockdown series, Isolation Stories, was thought “beautifully showcased” by the Guardian and “touchingly intimate” by the Independent. Projects with the BBC are on the way.
“I love playing character and being anyone else,” Smith once said. “It’s just me I have trouble with.”
Becoming Mum will be shown on Tuesday 1 September at 9pm on ITV
