Can’t wait for the inevitable three-part drama starring Sheridan Smith.” This tends to be the refrain on social media whenever something remotely newsworthy happens in Great Britain: if it’s a gripping story, or so our collective thinking goes, then it’s surely only a matter of time before ITV has snapped up the rights and cast Our Sheridan in the lead role.
Over the past few years, it’s become a full-blown meme, with online wits editing Smith’s face onto the body of various real-life figures (Holly Willoughby! Captain Tom’s daughter! Liz Truss!) in a sort of demented fan cast. Last year, it all got a bit out of hand when This Morning talking head Gyles Brandreth (incorrectly) announced that ITV had signed up Smith to play Kate Middleton in a series called The Lost Princess, based on some not entirely convincing tweets.
The joke, of course, comes from a good place. It’s not just Smith’s ubiquity that makes her so meme-able, but the fact that she probably could pull off the vast majority of the unhinged roles she’s been “cast” in by the British public, and reduce us all to tears while doing so. And the 44-year-old has taken it all in her stride. “I love them, keep them coming, they make me laugh so much,” she told Capital Breakfast last week. How refreshing: an actor who doesn’t take herself particularly seriously, while continuing to turn in great work.
It’s all a testament to Smith’s versatility (in case you’d forgotten, she first became famous for comic roles in the likes of Two Pints of Lager and a Packet of Crisps and Gavin & Stacey), and to the way she seems to connect with the TV viewing nation. It’s also, I guess, a hat-tip to her agent, who must be the second hardest-working person in British showbiz, behind Sheridan herself. But sometimes I wonder whether the memes, however well intentioned, are distracting us from just how good Smith actually is, and underestimating the subtlety with which she approaches these parts – because when she steps into the shoes of a real-life person, she is utterly transformed.
Take her latest role in the harrowing based-on-a-true-story drama I Fought the Law, which has just launched on, you guessed it, ITV. Smith plays Ann Ming, a nurse who discovered the body of her daughter Julie hidden beneath a bathtub in her home in 1989. Ming (who’s also been involved in the making of the show) spent decades campaigning to overturn England’s 800-year-old double jeopardy law, to ensure that Julie’s previously acquitted killer, who’d boasted about getting away with the crime in his local pub, could be tried again.
A resilient, righteously angry woman who refuses to crumble in the face of a terrible grief and a bureaucratic, unfeeling justice system: it’s an ideal part for Smith, and one she plays to perfection. “No one does this kind of drama better than Sheridan Smith,” The Guardian’s review declared, while The Independent hailed her depiction of Ann’s fragility: “She wears her wrath and northern ire like a mourning veil.” Here, and elsewhere, her skill is in magnifying and elevating her character’s ordinariness, so that their pain and frustration becomes almost unbearably real: in the scene where Ann finds her daughter’s body, Smith manages to imbue four words (“she’s under the bath”) with a whole spectrum of grief, horror and anger.
Her characters feel lived in, like someone we already know, and they seem to be crafted with a deep empathy. She brought a similar rawness to her portrayal of Sarah Sak, another grieving mother fighting to be heard, in the BBC’s true-crime drama Four Lives (Sak told the series’ writer that she wanted a “gobby northern bird” to play her), while her turn as community leader Julie Bushby in The Moorside, based on the Shannon Matthews abduction case, was another layered portrait of everyday heroism.
And she’s just as good in fictional roles – even when the material is a bit iffy. In Channel 5’s The Teacher, a run-of-the-mill melodrama about a teacher accused of sleeping with a pupil, she brings depth and nuance to a character who would have ended up two-dimensional in another performer’s hands.
Her skill is in magnifying and elevating her character’s ordinariness
You wonder whether Smith’s own ups and downs have made her more empathetic, more able to understand other people’s troubles on an almost microscopic level. Her struggles with alcohol and her mental health have been well documented in the media, and not always kindly: not least when she broke down while appearing in a West End production of Funny Girl, after her father was diagnosed with terminal cancer. “I think the time I can really act is when it’s someone’s pain,” she told The Guardian last month. “Whether it’s my pain coming out through the acting, I don’t know.”
These days, she has said, “sobriety and [her] son come first”, so she tends to “choose [her] parts very carefully”, wary of “anything that might knock [her] off kilter”. For that reason, I’m not sure that Smith will do an Olivia Colman and trade up a major career in her own country for Hollywood success, even though she certainly has the talent to do so. But their loss is our gain. Sheridan Smith dramas are the best thing about British telly – and long may they continue to be.
