Soulful Stories with Sue Vincent (actor and writer)

I feel people think any success has been an overnight thing, but it’s not, it’s taken thirty years and to write at the rate I do its taken loads and loads of discipline. Writing also takes practice. People often ask me how do you do it, and I tell them it’s like going to the gym, and that if you go every day you’re going to get a six-pack, and if you write everyday you’re going to get pretty good at it.

But I didn’t start out wanting to write, from an early age I actually wanted to be an actress. When I was six, I went to tap dancing classes, but I wasn’t very good, and they asked me to leave. I can actually remember standing looking up at this teacher, holding my tap dancing shoes and she saying to my mother ‘she’s just got no rhythm’.

My mum asked me what I did want to do, and I said I want to be actress like Pauline Quirk on Junior Show Time. I then found myself going to have an interview at speech and drama and there was a woman there, she was a scouser but she was trying to do that posh accent that northerners try to do, and I remember my mum and her having one of these accented conversations.

By the time I was eight I was reading Shakespeare. I can remember my mum walking into my bedroom and I’m sat there with Shakespeare in one hand and a glass of coca cola in the other, and mum saying ‘what you doing?’ so I said told her and she replied ‘I don’t know where you’re from’.

It was just in me and from that time I was also writing sketches and skits and jokes too. It was as if I had no choice but to do it. But, I didn’t leave school and go straight into acting, I actually trained as a hairdresser whilst knowing I what I really wanted to do was be on stage. I didn’t want to go to university, even though my English teacher, was very encouraging for me to do so.

So, I did YTS training in hairdresser and qualified at eighteen and I found myself getting sent to Pontins in Morecombe to manage the hairdressing salon. I’d only been there about twenty minutes before these three Blue Coats burst into the salon each saying ‘hiya, we’re the Blue Coats and we are all gay’. Now I had never met a gay man in my life, but another twenty minutes later I knew that I’d found my tribe.

It was 1986 and I even went to the club called Heaven in London with some of the Blue Coats and I’d seen George Michael snogging another man. I went back to the salon and told everyone, but they didn’t believe me or that George Michael as gay.

Pregnancy Bumper Pack

Pregnancy

Maidstone, Kent

From £410.00

Six Week Journey Into Self

Coaching

Online

From £444.00

I left the salon at Pontins and went to become a Red Coat at Butlins and was involved in the entertainment and compering and all the time the whole drama school side of things continued to allude me. And then by the time I became twenty-three I was doing local am-dram, I had broken up with my boyfriend and someone had left me a video of The Dead Poets Society and a bottle of wine. From that moment on it was going to be all carpe diem and I decided to go to drama school and got offered a place. I got offered a few other places but the guy that ran it was so inspiring. I remember in my audition he laughed in all the right places. I also needed a grant and through persistence and writing letters telling them that I didn’t want to be famous I just wanted to be recognised for the art that I love, I got one, which turned out to the last ever grant awarded in the North East. I was also a thousand pound over drawn which was a problem, but then I won a thousand pounds on the works summer raffle. It was as if the stars aligned and off I went to drama school.

At drama school I learnt so much. I also had an agent who told me that I wouldn’t start flying until I would be in my mid-thirties. I was so offended. She told me it was about castability. She was right though because I didn’t get my first big tele until I was thirty-five.

So much has happened when I’ve just let it happen. The phenomenal Mel Robbins writes about this in her book The Let Them Theory. I’ve read a lot of literature on self-improvement and self-enhancement, and I love my meditation and finding that sense of calm and peace. I think there’s much about being able to just ‘let go’.

From my thirties on, I, like many actors, do the Holby’s and Casualties, and my big break came at a profound time in my life. I was forty-three and landed a part in Shameless. I got the call for it whilst I was sat in hospital with my mum, she’d been diagnosed with lung cancer. This was also at the time that my marriage of twenty-three years was in trouble. I got the part of a raunchy character called Derille, who was one of the gastric bandits, who fulfilled all of Frank’s fantasies.

I remember one day in the dressing room, all dressed up, my phone rings and its my mum, still in hospital, then it rings again and it’s my husband saying don’t come home I still don’t love ya, then there’s a tap on the dressing room door and voice shouts ‘ready when you are’. I was feeling ‘oh shit’ but opened the door and the runner looks at me and says ‘fuck me your tits look great in that’.

So yes, Shameless definitely set me off and led me to Mount Pleasant where I met Sally Lindsay. I’d been there for a couple of episodes before Sally came over one day and said, ‘you are you-you’re absolutely brilliant?’

I got parts in more episodes and eventually became a regular and it changed my life. Sally also asked me if I wrote and I told her I did, and she told me to send her some things. This was big for me because Sally is iconic. The next day she phones me up to tell me that my dialogue is brilliant-unbelievable.

Now Sally was still filming Open All Hours, and she phoned me saying she was stuck in some caravan, and it was raining, and she just needed to write about something sunny and started to write the Madame Blanc Mysteries. I remember her telling me at time that she wanted to be a female Lovejoy and with me we could do something. Then sometime after Sally rings me again and says, ‘we’ve been commissioned’. Channel Five got behind Madame Blanc Mysteries but we needed was a script written but everyone was booked. It was then Sally said to me ‘do you think we could write crime?’ to which I replied, ‘piece of piss’. And we did, we wrote it and off it went.

Sally went to France but that didn’t work out, so she went to Malta and phoned me saying ‘it doesn’t look like France’, and then she phones back and says, ‘hold on, it does look like France’. So, then we both go over to do a recce. It was March 2020 and just like that Covid hit. We flew back and by now we were past tears. It felt like we’d had the Madame Blanc Mysteries and then it had been taken away. But it turned out we’d been ring-fenced, and we were able to film.

For the first series we had the island to ourselves, and we managed even though everyone wore masks and was social distancing and having to isolate in our hotel rooms, but we did it and it was like a dream come true.

That feeling of having spent hours writing, then you find yourself on set with the cast, make-up, designers and the actors are bringing to life the words you have written is the biggest buzz in the world.

Looking back at the world Sally created the timing for the Madame Blanc Mysteries was just right-people wanted the sun to shine, they didn’t want too much murder, and they wanted a drama that was rooted in characters. And characters and dialogue are where I excel. I have no children and live on my own. You never stop. I am always leaving notes on my phone, and I have the discipline to get it all down. I’ve learnt that the trick is to just keep going.

There’s now a lot of love for the Madame Blanc Mysteries and it’s still growing. We got a What to watch in the New York Times for series three. I told Sally I was going to get a tattoo of it on my head, but Sally talked me out of it.

We also have the Christmas Special coming this year too. It’s a double length episode. We have some amazing guest stars in it. It’s phenomenal!