For an actress of such small stature, Jane Horrocks likes to go over the top. “Ab Fab, that was larger than life, but it still resonated with people,” she says of Jennifer Saunders’ glorious 1990s sitcom that starred Horrocks indelibly as the crazy assistant Bubble, invariably dressed like something out a Christmas tree.
“But you don’t get that kind of comedy anymore. You don’t get those big character sketch shows like The Catherine Tate Show or The Fast Show. That kind of comedy is considered a bit crude these days. It is now the tradition to downplay everything. It’s all about the cool irony.”
Cool irony is not a style easily associated with Horrocks. For her it’s all about the caricature, those ‘large, elaborate characters that you can surrender to’, as she puts it herself. This Christmas she’ll be seen giving it her all in two such great examples – as the voice of the guileless Babs in the sequel to Aardman’s 2000 animated hit Chicken Run, and as the battle-axe-wielding village butcher Annette in Blood, Actually, the Christmas special for Johnny Vegas’s series Murder, They Hope.
“It has a beginning, a middle and an end,” she says almost proudly of the silly League of Gentlemen-meets-Wickerman-style parody in which newlyweds Terry and Gemma reluctantly become embroiled in the case of an apparent serial killer. with the intention of eliminating every participant in a Santa Claus competition in a close-knit rural community.
Starring a range of reliable mid-range comedy talents including Anita Dobson and Lee Mack, this is the TV equivalent of cozy crime with a big ladle of English silliness thrown in. ‘It probably sounds a bit old-fashioned. But that’s the kind of comedy I respond to.”
Horrocks, 59, doesn’t care about fashion. Not for her, a career built on awards, magazine covers and ratings. For someone with such bankable comedic talent, many of her choices over the years have been decidedly personal, under the radar, and self-generated. In 2016 there was If You Kiss Me, Kiss Me – a piece in which Horrocks performed her favorite new wave covers; Cotton Panic!, a devised show about the Lancashire cotton industry at the Manchester International Festival in 2017; and Love Pants, the 2022 Radio 4 drama she made about her late 1980s relationship with singer Ian Drury.
“I like niche,” she says. “There’s so much emphasis on having a successful project that attracts a certain number of likes, or whatever. Young people in the industry now – they have to have that many followers to get work.
Horrocks and I meet in a cafe in Brighton, where she now lives, following the end of her twenty-year relationship with the writer Nick Vivian, with whom she has two adult children. She looks exactly the same as always: high cheekbones, mischievous eyes, blond, elfin appearance. And of course she sounds exactly the same: that soft Lancashire tone, as wide and warm as ever. That voice is both its capital and its USP. “I like to hide behind a voice, a persona,” she says. Even plastic chickens. “I do think that the voices can be a bit boring in animation these days, you can’t really tell who the character is. Studios only seem to want big names in animation.”
I told Horrocks that she too is a big name, although she demurs. “I never see myself that way,” she says. Yet 25 years ago she was on the brink of Hollywood stardom. After graduating from RADA in 1985, where her contemporaries included Imogen Stubbs and Ralph Fiennes, and after a brief spell at the RSC, she found early success playing the embattled bulimic 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 hermit with an extraordinary singing voice, written for her by Jim Cartwright after he heard Horrock’s Judy Garland sing during rehearsals for his previous play Road, and it became a West End hit.
How did it feel to see her starring in a West End show built entirely around her? “I was terribly worried when he suggested it – I’m not a trained singer,” says Horrocks, who did indeed sing Barbra Streisand in her bedroom as a child, although she is keen to point out that as a teenager she also immersed herself in Burnley’s new romantic club scene. “During rehearsals I could only sing if I hid behind a pillar.”
The play was turned into a critically acclaimed film by Cartwright in 1998 and Horrocks, now a celebrity after the success of Ab Fab, found himself in America undergoing ’rounds of promotional interviews with everyone asking the same thing. I didn’t really like it.” She was also pregnant with her daughter, her son was only 18 months old, and instead of staying in LA to capitalize on her success, she came home.
She doesn’t regret it. “I always thought Hollywood would be a pretty lonely place to be.” She also thinks she would never have fit the Hollywood mold. “I don’t do sexy. And at RADA it was almost frowned upon to consider yourself a character actor. But I knew I would never be the leading actress. You had to look good for that back then. Now I am grateful. Because some of the pretty women I knew at RADA and the RSC in particular, once their looks start to fade, they can end up on the scrap heap. That can be very difficult as an actress.”
Her life is one long story in which she never quite does what she expected. For example, it was unusual for a village girl from Lancashire to even dream of becoming an actor. “The expectation in the community was that you would find a job within the valley. But I always thought there was something outside Lancashire for me.” At RADA it was not done to stick to a regional accent. “If I had left it out, I might have gotten more mainstream roles, but I always refused. It’s a part of me.”
Throughout her career, her choices have been unerringly unpredictable. In 1995, she played the role of Lady Macbeth opposite Mark Rylance in a production, notable for requiring Horrocks to urinate live on stage every night. In 2018, she appeared out of nowhere as Regan opposite Glenda Jackson in Deborah Warner’s King Lear. (And 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 an upper-class English expat in Christopher Hampton’s colonial-era drama The Singapore Grip. Every time she finds herself being put in a box, she goes in a different direction. “I was recently offered a role that was a bit like Bubbles. But I don’t want to do that anymore at 59.”
She thinks the abundance of roles for women her age is limited. “There are a handful of actresses who are doing very well. But many talented women my age continue to play mothers.”
Not from Horrocks, of course – not least because in her youth she was offered many fragile, single mother types because of her appearance, and she abruptly refused. She will be back on stage early next year, in an as yet unannounced new performance.
All she will say about the role is this. ‘The director said I could play it as a femme fatale, or as an odd one out. And I almost screamed ‘stranger!’”
Blood Actually: A ‘Murder, They Hope’ Mystery releases on Gold on December 16; Chicken Run: Dawn of the Nugget can be seen on Netflix from December 15