Sharon Small On Why She'll Never Forget Her Roots
Sunday Mail, 16 July 2000
Boys? I beat them up as a kid... but now I let them break my heart.
By Annie Leask
IF EVER anyone looked like they would come off worse in a fist fight, it would be actress Sharon Small. She is so slender and fragile, she is almost swallowed up by the large leather sofa we are sharing. But Sharon - best known for playing holiday rep Carol in the BBC1 series Sunburn - is not as dainty as she appears. Until the age of 10, she and her four younger brothers and sisters lived in the run-down schemes of Drumchapel, on the outskirts of Glasgow. Fighting was not an option, it was a necessity.
"I had to learn to fight. We all had to fight growing up there," she says.
"Of course," I nod, "We all had playground fights, all children quarrel."
"No," Sharon politely corrects me. "These were real, proper, fights."
In those days, she'd fight girls - or boys - in the streets around her tenement home. You had to be hard to survive.
She gives a wry smile and says: "Yeah, it was really rough. People there might hate me for saying this, but it's true, that's how it was."
Sharon, 32, is sipping mineral water at a London showbusiness club where she has come to talk about her latest TV series, a six-part serial called Glasgow Kiss. (BBC 1, Tuesday July 25, 9.30pm). She stars as Cara Rossi, a feisty Scots-Italian management consultant who has an on-off love affair with a widowed sports writer, played by screen hunk Iain Glen. Filming the show, which also stars TV funnyman Gordon Kennedy, took Sharon back to the city of her birth for the first time in years. Her family lived in the tenement until she was about seven, then moved to a small house, before uprooting to Fife, by the sea.
"My parents moved to Fife because they thought it was a better place to bring-up children and that we would have a better quality of life. It was great there," she says.
Sharon did the same drama course at Kirkcaldy College, Fife, as Dougray Scott and Ewan McGregor, before going onto drama school in London. In between honing her craft in the theatre, she starred in the BAFTA-winning No Child Of Mine and three years ago won a Best Actress Award at the Edinburgh Film Festival for the movie Bumping The Odds. She hasn't seen the children she grew up with in Drumchapel since she left - and daren't say what she's heard has happened to some of them.
"What dead, or in prison?" I joke.
"Yes, dead, prison, or worse," she dead-pans back.
However, she is anxious not to give the impression that Drumchapel is as bad now. "It has all changed such a lot. It is really lovely now," says Sharon.
And she wants to make it clear she has some happy memories of the city too.
"Because I was quite young I didn't go round looking at the great architecture, or anything like that, but I do remember how warm the Glaswegian people were and still are.
"They have great character and a wonderful, dry sense of humour."
And she adds: "Cara's smart, middle-class upbringing is not like mine at all - and I don't have the same relationship with my family as she does. I love going home, but there is something about it that leaves you slightly vulnerable. Your family are able to cut straight through to you. They often view you as you were 10 years ago and find it difficult to see that you have moved on. That works the other way round too and it's a joy to discover your little brother has grown into a really decent man, or to see that your parents are really in love.
"I was in Fife last week to be bridesmaid at my sister's wedding. She is three years younger than me and the first of us to get married.
"I was at her hen night. We didn't do anything outrageous, just got drunk and made a lot of noise, but I did get some great photographs from the disposable cameras I left around for people to use.
"I talk a lot to my mum and brothers and sister, but they don't really know what I do. They don't really go to the theatre, so they are not aware of that side of it. When I told mum I was off to London to be an actress, it was like, 'Really? How do you do that?' But they have always been really supportive."
Unlike Cara, Sharon doesn't feel under pressure from her family to find "Mr Right" but, like her character, she says she, "knows about all the baggage you can bring to a relationship".
She confesses: "I have been in three long relationships, two of four years and the last for five years. I know what it is to have my heart broken. Break-ups are horrible, so I can identify with what Cara and Stuart go through. But maybe, after three serious relationships I have to face up to the fact that it is me that is the problem, not the guys."
She adds, with a touch of Glaswegian humour: "I know I am too idealistic. It's typical isn't it? We end up with someone, try to change them, then chuck them for not being the person we fell in love with."
Sharon needn't worry. With her looks and personality, there will always be other guys queueing up to be changed.
COPYRIGHT 2000 MGN LTD.
