Sharon Small Interview
BNET 3/11/2001
If Sharon Small didn't exist, Japanese animators would have to invent her. There's something of the Manga heroine about her tiny body and headlamp eyes. She's sitting in the restaurant of a busy London hotel, juggling a tea cup and a silvery mobile phone, but would be better suited to a ray gun and mini-skirt combo. She mentions that she is learning to kickbox, which comes as no surprise. "I like kicking," she smiles, sweetly.
Small is 33 but, thanks to those peepers and a world-class haircut, looks about five years younger. She earned her stripes on the stage and in the Bills and Hamish Macbeths which seem compulsory for Scottish actresses. Critical kudos came with the acclaimed 1997 TV film Bumping The Odds (also starring her friend Shirley Henderson) and No Child Of Mine, a Bafta-winning drama about child abuse.
Her breakthrough year was 1999, when she landed the part of a holiday rep in the hit Michelle Collins vehicle Sunburn. She followed that up last year with a starring role in Glasgow Kiss, BBC Scotland's romantic drama about the relationship between an unlucky- in-love financial whizz and a widowed sports journalist, played with appropriate dourness by Iain Glen, the lunching lady's crag-faced crumpet. Women come up to Small in the street and ask whether she was in Glasgow Kiss. She says yeah and they go, "Iain Glen! Omigod! Omigod!" It's a humbling experience.
Small can expect something similar when her new two-part drama A Great Deliverance, the first in a proposed series of Inspector Lynley Mysteries, screens tomorrow and Tuesday. This time she's paired with catalogue handsome Nathaniel Parker in a police drama based on an Elizabeth George novel. Parker plays posh-but-haunted Inspector Lynley; Small is his sour-faced sergeant, Barbara Havers. They investigate murders and get on each others' nerves.
Hopefully the show will be a success, says Small, because then the Beeb will commission more episodes and she'll be able to wriggle further under the skin of Havers. Elizabeth George describes Havers as being "surrounded by a magnetic field that tends to keep people at a distance", which is meat and potatoes for Small who likes vulnerable characters with problems relating to other people. When asked to describe herself she frowns and says, "Sadly earnest, insecure". But then she says, "You know in Wacky Races, the one that goes by and it's just hands and legs everywhere? I'm like that."
She's funny, Sharon Small. Some smart cookie should cast her in a comedy. Funny voices, impersonating people, she loves that stuff. In a plummy accent, she does Nathaniel Parker betting on the gee-gees between scenes then she does a no-brainer Hollywood exec talking about Kate Winslet: "I know she's had two Oscar nominations but she's looking a bit chubba, so will she sell the picture?"
Her funniness is unexpected. Judging by the roles she plays, you expect severity and toughness. You don't expect the Sharon Small stand-up show and lots of touching your knee. I tell Small that I told a couple of people I was going to be interviewing her and they said they thought she was quite hard. "A lark?" she says, all feisty Fifeness. No, hard. "You can tell the people who say that I'm going to burst their f**king faces in," she gabbles, madly, before hooting to mark the joke. Then she says that someone from the props department on A Great Deliverance told her he hadn't been looking forward to working with her because he'd seen her work and assumed she was a horrible person. "Oh no," she mock-wails, "the whole world thinks I'm hard!"
Small was born in Glasgow, living in Drumchapel till she was ten. She really was quite hard back then, regularly getting into proper fights with the boys and girls who lived round about. She moved to Kinghorn after her mum fell in love with the seaside town during a caravan holiday - "we liked it so much we bought the company" - and immediately found herself in the position of tough wee girl from the big city.
"The kids were still having their childhood, whereas I think we were a little more streetwise by the time we got there. I was more aware of crime and drugs and religious differences." At such a young age? "Yeah. 'Are you a Catholic or a Proddy?' was always the first question you were asked in our street in Glasgow. I remember asking people that in Fife and them just going 'What?'"
She found small-town life a bit dull - "there wasn't much to do apart from snog boys" - especially for a girl with excess energy, who was always upside down on the couch or doing handstands in the living room. Later, when she attended London's Mountview Drama School, she fretted that a Scottish working class background was a disadvantage.
"When I first came into acting I used to really berate myself for not having been middle class and exposed to lots of books and theatre and wonderful films, for not having an English accent and an amazing insight into the world of media and celebrity and arts. When I went to drama school, I hadn't been to the theatre other than to see Cinderella with the school.
"We never had a book in the house. Food was the important thing, books were a luxury. Anyway, that sounds a bit weepy, but I think the things around me have been really rich and it just took me a wee while to understand that. Because I was much less exposed to anything to do with the arts, I had to look for other things within understanding people and concentrating on relationships with family and imagination - conjuring those worlds yourself. I love the fact I'm Scottish now, but I went through a period at drama school where I was thinking [voice of tearful frustration] 'Why was I born Scottish? I can't do this f**king English accent!'"
Small was told that she would never work if she kept her natural speaking voice and so adopted the identikit RP actressy tones you hear from Judi Dench and the like. She road-tested this accent during rehearsals for a theatre job in Perth and was told by the director to shut up and talk proper. Now she speaks like a Fifer with occasional hints of thespy poshness. She sometimes says "nut" for no, but you get the feeling she might call you luvvie at any time.
She's not shallow though. Listening to her talk about acting is a charged experience. She describes it with a rare articulacy. "When I'm on stage I can stop worrying about being me," she says. "It's like a switch goes off and fire happens and I'm allowed to be someone different. I like to try and manipulate the beast of the audience. It's terrifying but it's really exciting."
She's a perfectionist and is analytical about her performances but seems afraid of being perceived as a cold fish. She talks about Nathaniel Parker joking around on set but when asked whether she is more focused she makes a typically self-deprecating remark: "Probably just a little bit more up my own arse is a better expression."
Small is ambitious and gets nervous because she wants to do well. When she met Iain Glen for the first time she was a bit scared because he's got such a big profile and reputation. The pressure was on for them to click. People were saying, "We can't wait to get you two together to see whether there's going to be good on-screen chemistry," and Small was praying, "Pleeease, let there be chemistry". It all got to her and in their first scene together she dropped a two-pint glass of lager and was unable to speak. Still, that was a pretty good ice-breaker and they got on like, well, a pig on fire. Now she's looking forward to seeing Glen playing a villain in Tomb Raider so she can chuck popcorn at the screen and boo.
Lara Croft apart, Small feels that there still aren't enough decent, meaty parts for women. "If they could only see how wonderful we are," she sighs, theatrically, before leaning right into my tape recorder and barking, "We're worth writing about!" She's also indignant that you have to be pretty to succeed. "It's a different kind of competition for women," she says. "It's not just about how good an actor you are, it's about what you look like. That's tough, I think, because men don't have to compete on looks. After the hero, nobody else needs to be beautiful whereas all the women have to be beautiful, generally. And there's some fantastic actresses who don't fit into that criteria. That tall, slim, leggy model-type criteria."
Sharon Small isn't tall and leggy. She is, in fact, small. She seems quite slim to me but would probably deny this. The kickboxing is a tummy-flattening initiative - "I want to get a six pack," she announces, grandly. When she was researching A Great Deliverance she visited CID offices and spoke to female detectives. Her character, Havers, is drab and unfeminine, a misfit on the force, but the police she met were quite different. "They were very glamorous," she laughs. "Really sexy and sharp dressers. Tough women. What I got from them was a sense of 'Don't you mess with me, I'm just as good as you are'. They have to be able to joke with the boys, be better than them and really prove themselves because there will only be one female detective for every 12 males. And that's quite tough for a woman. There's all this testosterone flying around."
I get the feeling that Small has always felt a little like the odd one out. The Glasgow urchin exiled to the seaside, the teenager who wanted to be an actress when everyone else was going to work in M&S, the scared Scot in London who undervalued herself. When she applied for a place on the drama course at Kirkcaldy College, she was working in a nightclub and turned up for the audition wearing a tight blue dress and white stilettos. All the other hopefuls were sitting around looking moody in mangey macs. She felt like a stripper at a wake.
Although she is now confident in her talents, Small seems to focus more on what she sees as failings in her acting. When asked what her strengths are she adopts a deliberately feeble voice and says, "I try really hard." There's a sadness about her too, in spite of the gags. Maybe it's a personal thing. She has had three major relationships, two of four years and the last of five, which haven't worked out. She says she's happy being single, likes not being answerable when she comes home late after bumping into a friend and getting drunk, but you sense she misses the closeness and safety of a long-term partner. She's a romantic, I think. Her press officer jokingly suggests we print her mobile number at the end of this article so would-be suitors can get in touch.
Small wants to have children, feels she's at an age where she can look after them properly, but there's still something childlike about her. You can see it in the way her eyes light up when she talks about films she loves, when she's giving me a row for not liking Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon that much. She goes to see a film if she likes the director rather than the actors (although she will make an exception for George Clooney) and wants to work with auteurs like Paul Thomas Anderson and Baz Luhrmann. She accepts she's not at that level yet but has an optimism which I wouldn't bet against.
"I'm on track to some kind of longevity," she says. "Sticking around!"
That's Sharon Small - doing it for the kicks The Inspector Lynley Mysteries: A Great Deliverance is on BBC1, tomorrow and Tuesday.
