Julie Graham interview: ‘The industry has been flooded with posh actors'

Telegraph

22-03-2025

'I am so bored by this conver­sa­tion,' says Julie Graham, perched on an overstuffed sofa in a London hotel. Fortunately, she doesn't mean our interview. 'But I will continue to have it, because it's so important to me and for the next generation of actresses. They think it's not going to happen to them. But it will, unless there is drastic change.'
We've met to discuss Graham's latest role, as Elaine Phelan, the wife of Sean Bean's hard-bitten Ronnie who runs a drug-smuggling cartel in Liverpool, in Stephen Butchard's menacing new BBC show This City Is Ours. It's a vintage Graham role – a wily, tough-as-nails female operator who knows what she wants, and who, as the series develops, plays a pivotal role in the Succession-style jockeying for position between her son, Jamie, and Ronnie's right-hand man, Michael.
Yet, since filming wrapped, Graham hasn't worked for six months. 'Nothing has come through that I've wanted to do. The script is either not good enough or the part isn't big enough or there is nothing I can do with it. Writers seem to think that female characters over 50 need to be a certain type – someone with no agency, who is never the protagonist, who is sexless, nagging, confrontational. It's depressing.'
Graham will turn 60 in July. She has a tremendous unfiltered natural glamour and a gutsy no-holds-barred confidence. She's terrific company. She's been a regular on British screens for three decades, from the late-1990s caper Bedrooms & Hallways to the ITV comedy Benidorm, even if her career in recent years has been a bit undersung. But she refuses to buy into the prevailing absurdity that says the fact she continues to work at all makes her one of the fortunate ones.
'I did a lot last year [including the Channel 5 rags-to-riches period drama The Hardacres, in which she played the indomitable Ma Hard­acre, mouth and jaw set in a permanent hard line]. Though I do buck the trend to a certain extent: the lucky ones do. But I hate that word, 'lucky'. I've earned my stripes. I shouldn't have to say, 'I'm so lucky to be working.' F--- that. They're ­f------ lucky to have me.'
Part of the problem, she says, is the ongoing lack of female writers. 'Often with male writers, you feel they are 'writing for women'. They never quite get it right. Most of the time, my agent shields me from what's out there. I get sent these terrible scripts and she'll say, 'I really don't think this one is for you.' But Stephen's writing is wonderful, particularly in those scenes between women in private, away from the male gaze. But then he comes from a working-class background; you feel he understands.'
Which leads her on to working-class representation. She was brought up by her mother [she's never had a relationship with her father], a variety actress, in a ­working-class community in Ayrshire, not unlike the one depicted in This City Is Ours. But, she argues, there's a 'dearth' of shows depicting such communities on tele­vision.
'You see them all over the country, in Belfast, Glasgow, they are very familiar to me,' she says. 'They are very matriarchal. These women, who are at the head of the family, across all the decision-­making, they are not the sort to sink into the background. But you rarely see them on TV outside the soaps. Which is what made The Hardacres [which had an all-female creative team] such an anomaly.
'You used to get all those great Alan Bleasdale dramas. Not anymore,' she adds. 'Even when you have a series like A Thousand Blows, which is excellent, it's an epic period drama, it's not relating to today. The problem is that the gatekeepers are still stuck in the past.'
She's on a roll. 'It's not just the writers or the commissioners. Not so long ago, if you came to London to find your fortune in the acting industry, you could do so. Now, it's too expensive. But if Johnny from Eton wants to pursue being a poor, starving actor in London, he can afford to do it. So the market has become flooded with posh actors.'
Graham was indeed one of those who came to London to seek her fortune as an actress, at the age of 19. After her mother had died of lung cancer, Graham, who has no siblings and was only 18, knew she had to get out of Irvine where the pair had lived. 'I was grief-stricken, but not really dealing with it – there was no counselling back then – and I wanted to get as far away from home as poss­ible. The death of my mum was the worst thing that could have happened to me, but once that worst has happened, you become brave. It makes you take risks.'
She'd applied to drama school in Scotland but didn't get in, and, for a while, worked on the door at a Soho strip club. But although she then got a place at Lamda, she instead accepted a role in the 1986 Channel 4 drama Blood Red Roses. She worked consistently throughout the years that followed, starring in Taggart, At Home with the Braithwaites and opposite Martin Clunes in the ITV romantic drama William and Mary.
She was always a sparky, reliable presence, even if she feels, looking back, that some of the roles she was given were dubious. 'I do sometimes think, 'Why did I accept being the clichéd sexy girlfriend, the bit of eye candy?',' she says with a laugh. 'But that's what it was like. It's ­definitely getting better for younger actresses in terms of how they are treated and the image they have of themselves. They are much more outspoken and much less likely to accept that sort of role.'
She also took her clothes off an awful lot. 'There was a point in my career when I looked for the bit in the contract where it said, 'She has to keep her clothes on,'' she says, again nonplussed. 'But all my peers did it. It was just expected. I didn't do it gratuitously, though. I'm all for nudity in context. And although there were times when I was made to feel uncomfortable, I've always been outspoken enough to say, 'I'm not doing this.''
She's certainly refreshingly ­outspoken. Her current bête noire is the cultural squeamishness ­surrounding the menopause. 'I made a short film in lockdown called Dun Breedin', about five menopausal friends, on my iPhone, and I've since developed it into a six-part series. But I can't get it made. I perhaps foolishly pushed it as a menopausal comedy-drama, but that word had [commissioning editors] running for the hills. A ­couple of male producers even said they thought it had too many women and asked whether they all had to be over 50. Another one said they had already just commissioned a comedy about the menopause. But can you imagine going to ITV and saying, 'I've got a show about a male detective', and them replying, 'We've got one of those, thanks'?'
It's frustrating, she says, because the menopause is such 'fertile ground for drama, if you will excuse the pun'. Moreover, she is living testament to the accumulated life experience that can make stories about women in their 50s and 60s rather more meaty than ones about fresh-faced ingénues.
Graham has endured an awful lot: she not only lost her mother young, but in 2015, her husband, the actor Joe Bennett and the father of her two daughters, died by suicide, and not long after that, her best friend passed away. She is now married to Davy Croket, a ­Belgian sky-diving instructor.
'I feel my life is much more interesting now I'm heading for 60, and yet on screen it's not represented in that way. I'm married to a man who is 16 years younger than me; I'm still having an amazing sex life, but how often do you see that on screen? Even in Penance [the 2020 Channel 5 drama in which she played an older woman in a sexual relationship with a younger man], he turned out to be a conman who didn't really want her, he just wanted her money. At that age, if you have sex, you are punished for it.'
She's optimistic that things will change. ' Sally Wainwright has a new BBC show coming out called Riot Women, about a group of older women [to be broadcast later this year]. Hopefully, the more successful these sorts of shows are, the more people will realise this sort of territory is OK.' And until then? 'It's a waiting game.'