Mystery Girl

Caledonia, March 2001

Who is Sharon Small? Perhaps two years ago you'd have been forgiven for asking. Now, though, as her third starring role in a year hits the small screen, she looks set for the big time.

By Don Currie

SHARON Small cannot be described as a woman in a hurry. At the age of 33, she's only just bought a microwave - and she's raving about it: "It feels so grown up having one". We meet on the day after she has put the said machine through its paces for the first time - using it to cook an impromptu Burns Supper for a friend. "He's quite different to me - he's black and from Walsall and I don't think he knew what to expect. He thought he would get a nice sauce with it or something."

She grins. Sharon Small is nothing if not down to earth. Just as there are no trimmings with her microwaved haggis and neeps, with Small what you see is definitely what you get. And it is obviously what we want.

In the last year or so she has been catapulted from the relative obscurity of repertory theatre to the glamour and acclaim that goes with a succession of starring roles on television. She puts it down to luck as much as anything. First there was Sunburn, the comic adventures of a bunch of holiday reps on Cyprus, in which Small was a stroppy Scot, vying for promotion with a cocky newcomer played by the ubiquitous Michelle Collins. Then, last summer came Glasgow Kiss, a subtler drama with Small as the hard-nosed cost-cutter sent back to her home town to turn around the fortunes of an ailing newspaper, much to the dismay of Iain Glen, on top form as a loveable football reporter. This month she stars in The Inspector Lynley Mysteries as a frazzled London detective dispatched to a murder investigation in Yorkshire with a snooty colleague - the Lynley of the title - played by Nathaniel Parker.

This one has all the ingredients of a ratings topper a la Morse, Wexford and Frost: plenty of scenery, a soupcon of gore, an intriguing hint of a cover-up by the obstructive local plod and lashings of creative tension between the central duo.

It requires Small (whose favourite label is Armani) to don the dowdiest wardrobe of her career so far in a succession of ghastly jumpers and shapeless jackets. She makes few demands on the make-up team, either, as her character, one Sergeant Barbara Havers, makes a point of being every bit as plain and unflirty as Morse's Sergeant Lewis. Like all screen detectives these days, she comes with baggage attached - confused elderly parents and a secret smoking habit. Small clearly enjoyed the part, not least for its lack of reliance on looks.

"I had just come off playing Glasgow Kiss, where my character was quite a smart, middle-class Scot, and I really wanted to play something that was totally unglamorous and didn't depend on looks, so that I could hone some other skills or try to acquire them.

"I'm drawn to the Cinderella syndrome. You know, beauty is only skin deep. I find looks and beauty very difficult. Your attractiveness is such a key and there's so much pressure put on it. We're in the age of celebrity and beautiful people and I liked going for a character who was not beautiful, but had something beautiful inside.

"A lot of times the role of the woman is to be the head turner. The hero probably does have to look vaguely good but the other 27 men around him don't have to be beautiful. As soon as a woman who isn't perfect comes along people go "ooh it's the quirky look', or whatever, and you just think 'shut up'. You don't get that with men. You don't say 'the little bald one'.

"I can look all right at my best, or I can look really rough. I've got all right eyes, and I've got some good things going for me. But there are lots of things I don't like about my looks. I'm a real tubber at the moment."

One difficulty she had was with Havers' Cockney accent - which is surprising, given that London has been Small's home for 15 years. She has done countless English accents in theatre roles, but this was her first on-screen attempt.

"It's funny really," she says. "I love American accents and can slip into them easily, but the transformation from Scots to Cockney is harder for me."

The drama, a two-parter to be shown on successive nights, is based on A Great Deliverance, the first of a clutch of best-sellers by the American writer Elizabeth George. It does give a slightly transatlantic view of British society with the improbably aristocratic Lynley and the salt-of-the-earth Havers predictably at odds with each other until they unite in the face of hostility from the northern bumpkins. But the protagonists themselves are by no means stereotypes, with both Small and Parker - last seen as Rawdon Crawley in last year's ecstatically-reviewed Vanity Fair - turning in fine performances.

Plans for the future are undecided - though in the middle of our conversation a call comes through from the BBC to say the drama's title has been changed from A Great Deliverance to The Inspector Lynley Mysteries ~ which would seem to suggest further episodes are a strong possibility.

Whatever happens, Small will keep plugging away. She is patience personified as she poses tirelessly for our photoshoot at the stylishly minimalist Hempel Hotel, just north of Hyde Park. Similarly she is unconcerned about the time it took for fame to come knocking: "Of course I would have loved at 22 to have gone straight into a film and gone 'wahey I'm cooking' and then kept going, but that's not how it worked out."

Not one to take herself too seriously Small says the only job that beats acting would be "a wine taster for some huge wine tasting company". She has lately taken up Thai kick-boxing and is happy to be pictured trying a few moves in the appropriately Zen-like surrounds of the hotel lobby, "Your readers will be writing in to say that's not a proper move," she chuckles between shots.

Asked about future plans, she confesses to missing theatre and is also harbouring an urge to do films. But she'll take all offers of work on their merits. Having worked with a prominent soap star such as Collins, would she fancy a part in the much-publicised Scottish soap now at the planning stage? "There's such a kind of snobbery about soaps. It's bullshit. Your breaks all happen in different ways. I would never say never, because I don't know how things are going to work out for me." Sounds like a qualified 'yes'.

Meanwhile, Small waits to see what the reaction to Inspector Lynley is like, and concentrates on settling into the flat she has just bought in north London - her first long-term base after years as a nomad, staying with friends in between tours of the provinces. She's a frequent visitor to her parents in Fife, where the family moved from Glasgow when Small was 10. And she was among the throng of merrymakers dancing to Moby on Edinburgh Castle Esplanade on Hogmanay. She would not rule out a permanent return north one day especially in the event of children - not an immediate prospect as she's currently unattached. Until then, for a reminder of Scotland she can always look out the window - her new home is right beside the Alexandra Park deer enclosure.

The Inspector Lynley Mysteries is on BBC2 on March 12 and 13.

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