Not many actors are able to work from home, but for a group of women, filming has started on a drama series – in lockdown. Tamzin Outhwaite, one of the cast, is lucky that her partner is a director (although he is not used to shooting on an old iPhone). Her 11-year-old daughter is also helping with the camerawork. Is it weird acting in front of her children? She gives a throaty laugh. “Of course it’s weird.”
Outhwaite, still best known from her time in EastEnders, will star in Dun Breedin’, a comedy-drama created by the actor Julie Graham about a group of women brought together in a menopause support group. Outhwaite plays Indie, a free spirit who is trying to get through the hormonal change “with yoga and breathing. Other characters are like: ‘You need to get some HRT.’” As well as Graham, the other actors include Angela Griffin, Tracy Ann Oberman and Denise Welch (they are real-life friends), all filming their scenes from home to create 12 episodes, each just 10 minutes, to be shown on YouTube. The show aims to raise money for the Trussell Trust, the charity that organises UK food banks.
The menopause, despite being a huge shift for many women, has traditionally been ignored, says Outhwaite, who turns 50 this year. “It’s just not really documented and if it is, it’s in health pamphlets, as opposed to drama and comedy,” she says. Isn’t it also because menopausal women are of the age when society, scandalously, traditionally starts to ignore them? “Absolutely, but the women I know of that age are some of the funniest people. The way that women deal with things at that age can be very comical. And a woman can still be sexy and going through her menopause.”
Outhwaite says she found the first few weeks of the coronavirus crisis “really difficult”, although she knows she is lucky to be at home in north London, with her partner, Tom Child, and children, and with daily glimpses of her father, who is self-isolating from his home – a cabin built for him at the bottom of her garden. In positive moments, she says: “I think it will make us realise what really matters.” For Outhwaite, that is family and a job she loves.
Just before Covid-19 hit, Outhwaite was appearing in the Chekhov play, The Seagull, in the West End. They had only done a few previews before the theatres were shut, a week before the lockdown. “We don’t know when we’re going to kick off again, or if we kick off again. Whether people will go to the theatre. Personally, I can’t wait to go back.”
Outhwaite began her career on the stage – doing several years of musical theatre. She then spent a couple of years working regularly with the playwright Alan Ayckbourn, becoming one of his favoured actors, and was subsequently cast in EastEnders. She joined the soap in 1998, thinking she would just stay for three months and that it wouldn’t change her life much. “I thought: ‘This is just another acting job. It doesn’t mean that you’ve made it, because then you’ve got a whole heap of career to continue.’” Instead, she stayed for more than three years; by the time Mel Owen – no-nonsense, husky voiced, gorgeous – was written out in 2002, she had married first Ian Beale, then local criminal Steve Owen, been kidnapped and arrested for suspected drug smuggling.
During that period, when EastEnders was bringing in more than 10 million viewers, soap stars were the main focus of tabloid attention in the way that reality stars are now. Outhwaite was in her late 20s when she joined the cast, so says she felt relatively able to cope with the sudden fame. Were there times when it got too much? “Oh, yeah, there were many times when on a Friday night you’d get a phone call from the News of the World, or whatever, saying someone had tried to sell some story that was nonsense. It was a whole new world.” She was regularly followed by paparazzi. “There’s not a part of you that enjoys that. There is a feeling that you’re being spied on. Then your job is not just being an actor, you feel like some sort of public figure, but at the same time I never thought that I wanted to moan about it.” Her family and friends helped her keep perspective, she says. “When you think everyone’s reading nonsense about you, actually they’re not, because everyone’s busy with their own lives. But in your head it’s blown out of proportion.”
It must be hard for an actor to decide (if they have a choice) to leave the security of a regular, high-profile job and try to make it in the wilds outside, knowing there is still a bit of snobbery about soap stars. For every Suranne Jones, there are dozens more who struggle to transfer their profile into other roles. Outhwaite already had her lead role as an army investigator in Red Cap, the BBC drama, lined up when she left and she says she didn’t feel any anxiety about her career. The work has been steady ever since, including the BBC dramas Hotel Babylon and New Tricks, although she has been more likely to pop up in shows as a guest star than the lead. There have also been numerous theatre roles, including another Ayckbourn production and a triumphant turn in the musical Sweet Charity.
“When I hit 40, there were fewer scripts coming in,” she says. “It did feel like I wasn’t playing the leads in things, but that’s fine by me. I’m an ensemble actor, I really like to be in a company. I’m not desperate to have all of the responsibility on my shoulders. I haven’t really got much to moan about.” It was harder to leave EastEnders the second time, she admits (Mel returned to the square in 2018, and was killed off the following year), “because you’re older and you’ve got kids and the security’s actually quite lovely, it did feel different. I thought: ‘I wonder how I’m going to be able to move back into the acting world after this time round.’ But it’s been pretty nonstop. Until Covid.” She had a “lovely TV job” lined up that she’s not allowed to talk about. “I don’t know if that’s ever going to happen, but fingers crossed it does.”
She says she only ever wanted to make a living from doing something she loved. “To go from job to job, that was success, that was enough for me. I wasn’t desperate to play a lead at the National. I really wanted to be in Cats the musical and that was kind of it,” she says with a laugh. It hadn’t occurred to Outhwaite, who grew up in Ilford, east London, and whose father worked at a newspaper printing plant and drove a black cab, that acting could be a job. “I didn’t come from a showbizzy kind of family, or even an artistic family,” she says. “It wasn’t until I started auditioning for performing arts schools when I was 15 and then I was like: ‘Oh, people do this for a living’.” She says she never had a life plan. “No plan for career, family, anything. Otherwise, it’s just disappointment, surely, because things don’t ever really go to plan.”
Outhwaite’s time in EastEnders, even if the peak was some 20 years ago, created an enduring interest in her private life – it helped, then and now, that she was glamorous and had famous friends, such as the Spice Girl Emma Bunton, the Appleton sisters from the group All Saints, and the actor and presenter Amanda Holden. These days, her Instagram account is full of pictures of this girl gang, an instant nostalgia trip for anyone who yearns for the 90s, as well as cuddly selfies of Outhwaite with her boyfriend.
Her divorce from the actor Tom Ellis in 2014 was fairly public, and now she is fielding questions about her two-year relationship with her boyfriend, who is 21 years younger than her. Such a gap is rarely a big deal when it’s a man with a younger female partner, of course. “Whereas you cannot read anything about me without it saying ‘toyboy lover’,” she says with a laugh. “A woman being very sure of what she wants or what she is in her life doesn’t make her a cougar, because there are two people involved in this relationship. Not all men want younger women, that’s another thing. When you find someone you connect with, what, because you’re different ages you shouldn’t do that?” She says, and I can hear a wry smile in her voice, it’s not as if their age gap has come as a shock to them, something they have only read about in the newspapers. “We have thought about this, we have talked about this.” Has the interest put pressure on their relationship? No, she says. “At the beginning you think: ‘Can we do this?’ But the minute we became official and thought we’re all right with it, then no one else’s opinions matter, apart from my children.”
Other women in similar situations have contacted her to thank her for speaking about it, for normalising it. And it’s not that unusual, she points out – among the cast of Dun Breedin’, Graham and Welch also have much younger husbands. Outhwaite’s character does, too. Never has the menopause looked so enjoyable. “Julie and I always said we should put a tape recorder on [during] our evenings out and you’d get some great dialogue. A lot of the stuff that comes out of [my friends’ mouths] you think, if you had that in a script people would think it was far-fetched. What I love is that Julie has kept all that, the swearing and the gruesome stuff.” The show, she says, is “edgy, not worried about offending people. And I suppose that’s one thing that comes with age; you’re just so happy when you get to a place where you’re comfortable in your own skin. That gets left out of an awful lot of [stories about] women of our age – you’re comfortable enough not to worry about being judged.”
Dun Breedin’ is available to view on YouTube and new episodes land every Thursday
