About A Very Private Girl

The Daily Mail, 26 April 2002

By Jeremy Hodges

THERE is a certain irony in the screen image of Sharon Small lecturing Hugh Grant on the need to commit himself to a lasting, loving relationship. At 35, she is beginning to think that's what she might like herself. If only she could find the right man.

'I think earlier I wasn't ready, and when you get more ready it doesn't work out. It's that old cliche of timing, ' says the elfin-faced actress whose last long-term relationship broke up two years ago.

Emotionally, she may still be taking stock; professionally, her timing could scarcely be better. As of tonight, she can be seen on cinema screens all over Britain in About A Boy, the new Hugh Grant movie from the same successful stable as Four Weddings and a Funeral, Notting Hill and Bridget Jones's Diary. Her cameo role in the film may be the same as her surname, but it's a pivotal part that should get Sharon noticed by the big names in the movie business, and it comes just as her well-established small-screen career takes another step forward as she stars in the primetime Inspector Lynley Mysteries on BBC1.

Yet Sharon seems to lack the hard-edged ruthlessness of Hollywood superstardom. It's not that she's short on glamour. The green eyes and high cheekbones, framed by feather-cut, strawberry-blonde hair, can be used to devastating effect, as anyone who saw her passionate scenes with Iain Glen in Glasgow Kiss can testify.

'Glamorous is more stressful,' says Sharon, who likes playing scruffy Detective Sergeant Barbara Havers in the Lynley series because she doesn't have to wear makeup or worry about spots spoiling her complexion.

'Havers doesn't give a damn. She doesn't care what people think of her. It's quite freeing as an actress not to have to live up to a glamorous role, quite liberating not to have that pressure.'

For Sharon, the whole business of acting has been a liberation. Whatever inhibitions she might have in real life simply evaporate when she steps out on stage or appears before a camera. She was quite happy to be filmed stark naked in a bath, being showered with banknotes, in the BBC drama Bumping the Odds. Yet she confesses that if she had to stand up in front of an audience and speak as herself, she would die of embarrassment.

'I didn't go into acting to show off. It's just that when I'm acting something clicks off and it's not me any more, although the emotional truth is coming from me. I'm given a script and it's not Sharon any more, it's not me having to be me.'

She made this discovery as a teenager, while coming to terms with boys and puberty. Emotionally, she had already been through a lot. When Sharon was eight, her parents split up, and she has not seen her genetic father since. For two years, her mother struggled to bring up Sharon and her younger brother and sister in a tenement in the Drumchapel area of Glasgow.

'Like any mum, she just tried to take care of us and give us as much love as she could. She had a lot of kids to be juggling.'

As the oldest, Sharon found herself shouldering some of the responsibilities of motherhood.

'You muck in. I'm a bossy-boots, so I probably took the role on myself,' she says dismissively.

She does not like talking about the hard times when she had free school dinners and resists any suggestion of a tragic childhood.

'Marriages don't work out, it was very common at that time. Marriages break down and you're on your own. But it was all right. Then my mum and dad met and fell in love and we moved as a family to Kinghorn in Fife for a new beginning, and it was great.'

Her mother's second husband is the only 'dad' Sharon acknowledges. Ask her about the man who supplied half her genes and she blanks out. That area of her emotional past is not a place she cares to visit. Unlike many children of broken marriages, she had no problem accepting another man as her mother's lover and head of the family.

'They were very in love and that was enough.'

She was happy, too, to take his surname and keep it as an actress. She claims she 'didn't have the guts' to make up something more exotic than Small as her stage name, but love and family loyalty probably had something to do with it. Living by the sea in Fife, she delighted in playing football 'to annoy the boys'.

'It was incredible. It was the girls who were the hackers. I wasn't scared to go in and tackle.'

But when boys became more of a romantic prospect, she shied away from sexual adventure. Working as a waitress in a seaside cafe, she loved to chat up the Glasgow boys on their holidays, just as long as things didn't get too serious.

Then, at 17, she fell in love, and learned how cruel life can be. She had been too shy to go out with the boy a year before, but when he asked her again she said yes. For six weeks they enjoyed a blissful teenage romance. Then one night he failed to turn up for a date. Sharon waited for hours, unable to believe he had stood her up. In fact, he was dead, having suffered fatal injuries in a car crash on the way to pick her up.

'I found out when it had already passed. Nobody knew my phone number to tell me. We hadn't been going out together for very long, it was still at that magical stage.

'So I didn't really get to share it with his family. It was just a personal loss. I learned that tragedies are real things that can happen to you, that sudden loss of someone you love so much. He was the most full-of-life person I had ever met at that point in my life.'

Acting saved Sharon from despair. She won a place to study drama at Kirkcaldy Technical College, despite the mortification of turning up for audition in a tight blue dress and white stilettos, only to find jeans, jumpers and grandad coats were de rigueur among cool students of dramatic art. She knew next to nothing about acting, having had only a bit part in a school musical, but at that audition something happened to the gauche young girl in the sexy, Essex-girl outfit.

'It was like seeing a light or a star. I walked into that room and I thought, "This is where I want to be."

'For me, acting's about that feeling and having the ability to move people, to express feelings in a way that's safe, because it's not you. Let's face it, how often in real life can you get away with just standing up on the table and saying, "Look at me?" It's a form of madness, really.'

Yet acting saved her sanity and the seemingly senseless death of a young man in a car crash gave her the will to do something positive with her own life. After finishing the Kirkcaldy course, she packed her bags and went to London to study at the Mountview Theatre School.

'I just had a feeling of, "You have to go away." My boyfriend's death gave me the courage to leave and go to London. After the loss of such an amazing person, I told myself, "You have to try to make something wonderful about your life and really live".

'If that accident had not happened, I possibly wouldn't have gone. I always wonder. I really fell for him. I might have stayed behind. I possibly wouldn't have gone into acting.'

NONETHELESS, at just 19 and having only ever left Scotland for a school trip to Austria, she found herself in London with just £10 in her pocket. 'I didn't get my grant for six weeks. I just had to go into a bank and beg for a loan. The first flat I was in was absolutely horrible, you didn't want to go into the kitchen or bathroom. I had emergency food parcels sent down from Scotland, with jars of peanut butter.'

Since drama school, Sharon has worked with some famous names, from Robert Carlyle in Hamish Macbeth to Michelle Collins in Sunburn, and now Hugh Grant. Sharon found his public image as a stammering, emotionally inhibited public school stooge for Liz Hurley far wide of the mark.

'He is very strong as a person and a really versatile actor. People tend to put him in a box and say, "That's all he does", but when we were filming I watched him closely and he was very subtle and very different in every single take.'

The emotional territory of About A Boy felt very familiar to her, with the Hugh Grant character seemingly unable to commit himself to another person for life. Sharon herself has yet to find a love that lasts. She is protective of her privacy and seldom speaks about boyfriends.

She has said, however: 'I've always had boyfriends, in my adult life, I mean. The last three, an actor, a writer, a deep-sea diver, ran up 13 years between them. I love the buzz and anonymity of London, but the trouble is you don't actually meet a lot of people. It's rare that you see the same person twice. Not everyone has the courage at a first meeting to say, "Hello, I like you. Will you come out for a drink?", because invariably they think you must be involved with someone else already.'

Sharon would love to have children, but only with the right man. Until he appears, she is happy with a network of good friends who recently helped her fling her first-ever party to celebrate a birthday. Such friends come first, not her career. She nearly missed the audition for her latest stage role because she was looking after one who was seriously ill. But at the last moment she secured a leading role in Green Field, a new drama at the Traverse Theatre in Edinburgh. Coming home to Scotland feels good. She is staying in Kirkcaldy with her brother.

In Green Field, she plays a woman who throws her first dinner party for friends after three years of isolation following the death of her little boy. The character is not Sharon, but the emotional resonances from her own life are obvious. She has the depth of understanding to move people in the audience, to create something magical, just as she vowed to do after her own loss 18 years ago.

'We go on in life, we learn by our experience. A lot of times in life you can be hanging on to the past or dreaming about the future, but right now I'm taking stock and realising the present has some very rich qualities and lovely things to explore in it. I've stopped worrying about what's round the corner.'

Green Field, at the Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh, and About A Boy, at cinemas nationwide, both open tonight.

COPYRIGHT 2002 Solo Syndication Limited.

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