Plain Good Fun
The Courier Mail (Queensland, Australia) 5 May 2005
By Erica Thompson
Playing a sour and dowdy detective has been enjoyable for actress Sharon Small, writes Erica Thompson.
WHEN movie stars play ugly, they usually win Oscars. When television stars try it, they become social outcasts. Just ask Scottish actor Sharon Small, who went from playing a sexy magazine executive in Glasgow Kiss to a prickly, unattractive detective in The Inspector Lynley Mysteries. Small has spent the last four years playing Britain's most sour-faced sleuth, Barbara Havers.
"I was single through quite a lot of the filming and it didn't help looking like that," she laughs. "I thought: 'I'm never going to get a boyfriend!' "
Havers' dowdy clothes, pale skin and bad haircut even prompted a flood of letters from UK viewers desperate to give her a makeover.
"She's started to get a bit better as the series goes on," Small says. "But she's still a very different kind of female detective than what we're used to."
The diminutive actress, who starred opposite Hugh Grant in About A Boy, says she enjoys peeling back the layers of Havers' troubled past and points out that Havers has had "quite a sad time of it". "She has to take care of her mother, who has Alzheimer's disease, her father is sick and her brother died of leukaemia," she says. "Her self confidence isn't developed very well and so she's focused all her energies into her job and comes over as being quite tetchy and problematic."
Naturally, her superiors pair her with the most unlikely partner -- the dashing and wealthy Thomas Lynley (Nathaniel Parker) -- in the hope "Hurricane Havers" will leave the force. But much to the surprise of everyone -- except perhaps anyone who has ever watched a crime drama before -- Havers' icy reserve proves the perfect complement to Lynley.
"I think people really enjoy the character development between Nat and I," Small says. "We're not a detective show loaded with guns and go go go. We're much more gentle."
The Inspector Lynley Mysteries, Seven, Saturday 7.30pm.
