Shy Sharon Small Steps Up From Role As Mousy Sidekick
Detroit Free Press, 25 February 2009
By Luaine Lee
UNIVERSAL CITY, Calif. -- Every woman has her peak years. But during actress Sharon Small's she was cast as a fat, ugly woman on a now-famous British TV series.
"The director said, 'OK, Sharon, how do you feel about wearing no makeup, having a terrible haircut and wearing terrible clothes and playing this woman?' " she recalls in a lobby bar at a hotel in California.
The role was that of dumpy policewoman Barbara Havers in Elizabeth George's "The Inspector Lynley Mysteries."
"I'm not saying I was pretty, but it was one of those things that was pitted against me. They said she should be someone who's really quite awful looking. But the director was quite adamant and he said, 'You've brought the right element to the character,' which was then echoed by Elizabeth George, thankfully. But for my natural, most glamorous years ever, I was ugly looking."
At last Small wreaks her revenge. In BBC America's absorbing "Mistresses," she wears eyeliner, cavorts in a red bustier and enjoys a lusty affair with a mysterious gent.
Strangely enough, the real Sharon Small isn't anything like either of those characters. She's timid in interviews and frets, "How am I going to answer these questions? I'm quite shy and you worry that you're not articulate enough or that you can't get your point across in the right way, whereas when it's written for you, the character does that for you."
In fact, her shyness is part of the reason she's an actress. "It's a nice escape from real life," she nods. "I'm not actually a natural show-off. I'm chatty, but I'm not a natural show-off, so weirdly you'd think acting is about showing off, and it's not. It's about escaping into another character."
Small was born in the tiny Scottish resort town Kinghorn, just north of Edinburgh. Her mother held down three different jobs at various times and her stepfather owned small catering vans.
Secretly she longed to be an actress and the wish started to emerge when she was about 16.
The oldest of five, Small's childhood was troubled.
"We didn't have the most harmonious home life at the time and my mum did a fantastic job, but it can have an effect and it affects how you conduct yourself for the rest of your life," she says, "and how you conduct yourself in any given situation -- where you put your status, where you might have an inferiority complex about certain things. So you spend a lot of your life trying to overcome that, I think."
She struck out for London when she was 19, determined to study drama. She worked in bars to earn her keep.
"I left home on a night bus and school didn't start for two weeks but I had 10 pounds in my pocket and went overnight on the bus and took all my stuff with me. My mom waved me off, but I had no idea what the future held then. I have two sons now; I just wouldn't let them do that," she laughs.
