Small's Faces
Daily Mail (London, England), 12 January 2008
By Jeremy Hodges
AS one of four glamorous thirtysomethings in Mistresses, the naughty new BBC TV series billed as Britain's answer to Sex In The City, Sharon Small found herself in an incongruous position. It wasn't so much the sex, which in her case was filmed discreetly without too much nudity or embarrassing gasps and groans. It was the fact that whenever the director cried 'Cut!', Sharon would abandon all thought of passionate liaisons and dash off to her motorhome to feed her nine-month-old son Leo.
From the first rehearsal for the series last year, the Scottish actress who became a household name in the long-running Inspector Lynley Mysteries felt anything but sexy. Her co-stars Sarah Parish, Shelley Conn and Orla Brady all looked stunning 'and I was looking like some old sack, thinking: "Oh my God, I'm really out of the loop." The clothes you wear in pregnancy are just baggy clothes and, because I hadn't bought any new clothes when I was pregnant, I was sort of two years out of date.' But the wardrobe and makeup departments soon transformed her into the green-eyed, elfin-faced beauty we see on our screens -and her experience of motherhood proved invaluable as she became Trudi, a woman left widowed with two young children after her husband's death in New York in the terrorist attack on the World Trade Centre.
As Trudi tried to remain faithful to the memory of the husband she had though would be her first and only love, while embarking nervously on a new relationship, 40-year-old Sharon could understand all her anxieties and physical insecurities about becoming intimate with another man.
'A lot of women are unsure about their bodies, whether they've had a baby or not, and once you have had a baby, your body changes. Of course, you can work really hard and get into shape again - but I didn't have time to do any of that.'
Sharon's busy life as an actress, alternating film roles with Hugh Grant in About A Boy and Gerard Butler in Dear Frankie with the annual six month slog of making each series of Lynley, became further complicated with the arrival of Leo in 2006. He was barely three months old when the last Lynley started shooting and Sharon had a childcare problem. How could she cope with a baby when she had to leave home at about 5.30am, spend the day as Detective Sergeant Barbara Havers, then learn her lines for the next day? Her boyfriend Dan, 34, works during the day for a company staging exhibitions - and he certainly could not breast-feed their son, who had to stay with his mother. So Sharon called on the one woman she could trust to look after Leo between takes while she tackled the usual crop of violent criminals.
'My mum came down from Scotland and lived with me. She was fantastic. It's like she's an extension and a more experienced version of me. When I went back and did Lynley, she came with me in the Winnie (the Winnebago motorhomes used as dressing rooms for actors on location).
'Doing Lynley, I had a two-hour commute to work. I was trying to Pamper and breast-feed in the car, and they were really long days. I'd never have managed without my mum.
'Mistresses was filmed in Bristol and Dan occasionally had to work there, so he'd come and spend some time with us. We'd always come back home to London if we could at weekends and let my mum get back to Scotland.
'It is fantastic if you can have your mum there like that. She's been amazing. I haven't spent time with her like that since I was 19 and it's been precious time for me.'
SANDIE Small is her daughter's all-time hero and they share more than the physical similarities that enable Sharon to look stunning on screen. Sandie brought up three young children single-handedly after splitting up with their father. Sharon, born in Drumchapel, Glasgow, was eight when she last saw him, and has no wish to talk about him now. But she has nothing but admiration for the way her mother managed to bring up her and her younger brother and sister in a deprived part of Clydebank in the early 1970s. They lived on a shoestring and free school meals, in a very different world from the one little Leo knows in London.
'Watching my mum with Leo, I was completely humbled,' says Sharon. 'She did all that from quite a young age, while I'm in the position of having got a career under my belt and having made a bit of money, so I can afford to give Leo the food and the clothes. It was a struggle for my mum - she'd had three of us by her early twenties, when I was five.'
Eventually Sandie met and married Robert Small, a salesman who took the family away from Glasgow to the seaside holiday town of Kinghorn in Fife,where Sharon grew into a lively teenager who enjoyed swimming, canoeing and beating the boys at football. As the oldest, Sharon helped her mother when two more brothers came along: 'They were just these two gorgeous children to watch growing up as well. I got to see what it was like to have a child without having to have one myself.' She did a little acting at school and, despite taking physics, chemistry and biology for her Highers, decided to do an acting course at Kirkcaldy College.
She went off to the audition in a skintight blue dress and white stilettos: 'I remember my mum, as I was going out the door, saying, "Oh, you look beautiful!" Then I walked through the door at the college and was faced with all these people in black grandad coats, looking quite gothic - so within days, of course, I immediately conformed and went and bought everything from second-hand clothes shops.
'I'm still scruffy. My mum still tells me I'm scruffy. It's not that I'm not a clothes person, more that I'm not a shopper. Maybe that's what Dan saw in me,' she laughs. 'There's a girl who won't spend all my money.'
Finding Dan was like coming home after a long and sometimes troubled love life. Sharon had known her first real love for only a few weeks in Kinghorn when he was killed in a carcrash, on the way to pick her up for a night out. Heartbroken at the loss of a young man who had been so full of vitality, she was made vividly aware of how precious life is.
'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."'
From tragedy came the courage to apply to Mountview drama school in London and, at the age of 19 with only £10 in her pocket, Sharon took the bus down south. For years, acting was a financial struggle and TV roles came slowly.
Even at the age of 30, after starring with Iain Glen in the drama series Glasgow Kiss, she found herself out of work and having to go on a computer course so she could earn a living by temping. With no money to furnish her flat, she borrowed items of furniture from friends.
About this time, she first met Dan at a mutual friend's 30th birthday party, long before they became romantically involved. Looking back, she wonders if itwas always meant to be. 'Certainly Dan thought it was predestined. Later, I discovered he'd said after meeting me, "I'm going to be with her. I really like her." But at the time, I didn't know that. I didn't see it at all. I didn't see him often enough - I was too busy acting, or travelling, or whatever.' It was eight years before they became lovers. Sharon had been in several serious relationships, mostly with people in showbusiness - actors, writers and directors - but ultimately none of them worked out.
'Since I've been with Dan, other people have said, "It's so nice you've met somebody who's not in the business." But I wasn't attracted to the others because that's what they did - they were just people I met.
'With Dan, there are advantages, though,' she concedes. 'At home, we're not two actors constantly going on about the business - if I do, his eyes tend to glaze over.' In the years between first meeting and falling in love, Sharon achieved the success for which she worked so hard: 'I definitely had a drive to succeed. I can be very focused and I'm sure my upbringing created some of that determination to do the best I could.'
She adds: 'I'm still a bit of a perfectionist - annoyingly so. I'm quite feisty. But with me it's mixed with alot of vulnerability, a lack of selfesteem, which a lot of people have.
'It's probably a good thing that I'm with a man who is fairly gentle, otherwise we might be like two people caught in a sort of bullfight with each other. Dan and Leo are both quite gentle - Leo's not a grabby child. He's quite cuddly, which is nice. Sometimes when he and his dad are sitting together, they kind of mirror each other, they mirror each other's positions.'
As we speak, Leo, now 17 months, is making happy noises in the background as he switches on the television and attempts to help himself to a packet of ginger biscuits, after first bringing them to show his mother. Like all toddlers, he is forever into the food cupboards, putting the spices into the cereal packets and other such culinary innovations.
HAVING spent years as a single thirty something actress, forever telling journalists she would love to be a mother if only she could find the right man, she now seems to have everything a woman needs for happiness.
As yet, there have been no wedding bells. 'In a way, because I get to dress up in my job, I don't hanker after that big day. The thought of that one big day when there's a declaration of commitment and all that dressing up and speeches, that makes me feel queasy.
'I haven't felt any huge need to get married. Even as a little girl, I never did want to be a bride. I loved dressing up but not to be married to somebody else. It's probably a terrible need to be independent.'
Yet she believes 'totally in fidelity', loves being a mother - and does not regret the time it took to get there: 'Becoming a mother is a huge emotional journey to go on and I'm glad I had a bit of selfish time to myself first.
'There's a difficulty with being an actress because it's such a shortlived thing and you're easily forgotten, so you try to put off having a family. I really hoped I could be in a position where I could mix the two and still do a little bit of work, because I really enjoy it.'
With Mistresses already getting favourable mentions in the Hollywood Reporter and Lynley a hit with audiences in the U.S., Sharon might conceivably achieve her dream of appearing in an American TV series.
Scots actress Ashley Jensen did just that, winning a part in Ugly Betty after a lucky break in Extras, with Ricky Gervais, gave her a passport to Hollywood. But would such a move be compatible with Sharon's family life? 'Leo wouldn't have much to say about it but I think Dan would be up for it, although, unless the work was fairly long-term, it would probably be just me that would go.
'If I did get the offer, at this age, I'd say, "Yep, let's go - let's do it!" Then I'd think, "Oh My God, I'll have to lose five stone!" But that would be fantastic.'
Mistresses, BBC1, Fridays, 9pm
COPYRIGHT 2008 Solo Syndication Limited.
