by For such a small actress, Jane Horrocks loves to go overboard. “Ab Fab, who was larger than life, but he still resonated with people,” she says of the glorious 1990s sitcom Jennifer Saunders in which the indestructible Horrocks starred as the daffy assistant Bubble, always dressed like something out of Christmas tree.
“But you don’t get that kind of humor anymore. You don’t get those big sketch shows like The Catherine Tate Show, or The Fast Show. That kind of humor is considered a bit crude these days. The tradition is now to underplay everything. It’s about the cool irony.”
Cool irony is not a style that comes easily to Horrocks. She’s all about the framing, the “big, fleshed-out characters you can laugh at,” as she says. This Christmas she can be seen giving it her all in two such role models – as the voice of the no-nonsense Babs in the sequel to Aardman’s 2000 smash hit Chicken Run, and as the hatchet-faced village butcher Annette in Blood, Indeed, Christmas. special for the series Johnny Vegas Murder, They Hope.
“It has a beginning, a middle and an end,” she says, almost proudly, of the League of Gentlemen-meets-Wickerman-style romp in which newlyweds Terry and Gemma find themselves reluctantly involved in a serial killer case. The intention is to raise all participants in the Santa Claus competition in a close-knit rural community.
With an array of reliable comedy talent, including Anita Dobson and Lee Mack, it’s the TV equivalent of cozy crime with a big brandy-sized ladle of English guilt in it. “It’s probably a little old-fashioned. But that’s the kind of humor I respond to.”
Horrocks, 59, doesn’t care about fashion. Not her career was built on awards and magazine covers and audience ratings. For someone with such bankable comedic talent, many of her choices over the last few years have been resolutely personal, under the radar and self-generated. 2016 featured If You Kiss Me, Kiss Me – a piece where Horrocks showcased her favorite new wave covers; Cotton Panic!, a show about the Lancashire cotton industry at the Manchester International Festival in 2017; and Love Pants, the 2022 Radio 4 drama she created about her late 1980s relationship with singer Ian Drury.
“I like a niche,” she says. “There’s so much pressure to have a successful project that attracts a lot, or whatever. Young people in the industry now – they have to have so many followers just to get work.”
Horrocks and I meet in a cafe in Brighton, where she now lives, after the end of her two-decade relationship with the writer Nick Vivian, with whom she has two grown-up children. She looks just like she always does – high cheekbones, impish eyes, blonde, elfin top. And of course, she sounds exactly the same, too – the soft Lancashire twang as wide and warm as ever. That voice is both her capital and her USP. “I love hiding behind a voice, a persona,” she says. Even plastic chickens. “I think the voices can be a bit blurry in animation these days, you can’t really see who the character is. Studios seem to want big names for animation just for the sake of it.”
I told Horrocks that she is also a big name, although she demurs. “I never see myself that way,” she says. Likewise, 25 years ago she was on the verge of Hollywood stardom. After graduating in 1985 from RADA where Imogen Stubbs and Ralph Fiennes were among her classmates, and after a brief stint at the RSC, she soon became successful as bulimic opponent Nicola in Mike Leigh’s 1990 film Life is Sweet. Then, in 1992, came The Rise and Fall of Little Voice, the play about a recluse with an unusual singing voice and written for her by Jim Cartwright after he heard Horrocks sing Judy Garland during rehearsals for his previous play, Road, and that emerged. which hit the West End.
How did it feel to star in a West End show built entirely around her? “I was very nervous when he suggested it – I’m not a trained singer,” says Horrocks who sang to Barbra Streisand as a child in her bedroom, although she is keen to point out that she also dabbled as a teenager. . Burnley’s new romantic club scene. “During rehearsals I could only sing if I was hiding behind a bullet.”
Cartwright turned the play into a critically acclaimed film in 1998 and Horrocks, now a celebrity after the success of Ab Fab, found herself in America, following “rounds of promotional interviews where everyone said the same thing question. I didn’t like it very much.” She was also pregnant with her daughter, her son still only 18 months, and instead of staying in LA to take advantage of her success she came home.
She has no regrets. “I always thought Hollywood would be a lonely place.” She also thinks she would never fit a Hollywood model. “I don’t do sexy. And at RADA, it was almost frowned upon to think of yourself as a character actor. But I knew I was never meant to be the leading lady. You had to be polite to be so then. Now I am grateful. Because some of the particularly well-known women I knew at RADA, and at the CSI, when their looks start to deteriorate they can find themselves on the scrap heap. It can be very difficult as an actor.”
Her life was one long story that she failed to do so. It was not, for example, what a village girl from Lancashire dreamed of becoming an actress in the first place. “The community expected you to find a job in the valley. But I always thought there was something beyond Lancashire for me.” RADA did not stick to a regional flavor. “If I ended it, I might have more mainstream parts, but I’ve always turned it down. It’s a part of me.”
During her career her choices were unpredictable. In 1995 she starred as Lady Macbeth opposite Mark Rylance in a production, notable because Horrocks had to urinate live on stage every night. In 2018 she appeared out of the blue as Regan opposite Glenda Jackson in Deborah Warner’s King Lear. (And she fondly remembers eating Hoola Hoops and drinking wine every night in her dressing room with Jackson, who died in June of this year.)
In 2022 she appeared, cast completely against type, as a classy English expat in Christopher Hampton’s colonial-era drama The Singapore Grip. Every time she finds herself being punched she moves in a different direction. “The other day I was offered a role that was a bit Bubbles. But I don’t want to do that at the age of 59.”
She thinks that the number of roles for women of her age is limited. “A handful of actresses are doing very well. But a lot of talented women my age are stuck playing mum.”
Not Horrocks of course – especially because when she was younger she was offered a lot of vulnerable single mom types, because of her looks, and she turned them down out of the blue. Early next year she will appear on stage again, in a new play without prior notice.
She has nothing to say about this role. ‘The director said I could play him as a femme fatale, or as an oddball. And I was almost screaming ‘oddball!’”
Blood Actually: Murder, They Hope, There’s a Mystery on the Gold on December 16; Chicken Run: Dawn of the Nugget on Netflix from 15 December
