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The unravelling of Sheridan Smith

Sheridan Smith and Gary Barlow performing on The Jonathan Ross Show - Shutterstock
Sheridan Smith and Gary Barlow performing on The Jonathan Ross Show - Shutterstock

If the pictures of her crumpled Range Rover are anything to go by, Sheridan Smith is indeed “lucky to be alive.” The 40-year-old actress reportedly skidded off the road and into a tree in Little Sampford, Essex, on a stormy Saturday evening – thankfully escaping with only “cuts and bruises.”

Those images are just the latest in the ongoing unravelling of the Cilla and Cleaning Up star, who had appeared on the Jonathan Ross show that same night to promote her new Christmas single with Gary Barlow. According to reports, she had become “upset” backstage after filming the show due to a “misogynistic” atmosphere that left her “absolutely furious”.

ITV released a statement, insisting: “We treat our guests with courtesy and respect at all times.” But the incident – like so many of those she has been embroiled with in recent years – left many wondering whether the singer and actress was again battling demons she has spent years trying to put to bed.

The mother-of-one has spoken openly of her vulnerabilities in the past, admitting to suffering a physical and mental breakdown in 2016. And vulnerable is precisely how Smith came across when I interviewed her for The Telegraph back in 2014 for her shorn-headed portrayal of terminal cancer sufferer Lisa Lynch in the BBC’s The C-word. Delightful too, warm, funny, and of course insanely talented, but plagued with a self-doubt that infused almost every aspect of our conversation – from the personal and physical to the professional – one she resolutely refused to hide.

When, after a sell-out run in the stage adaptation of the hit movie Legally Blonde, the Bafta, Emmy and Olivier-award-winning actress was cast in Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler at the Old Vic in 2012, she told me she “knew it was a bit of a shock to people... I knew that people were thinking it was going to be disastrous. But I also had people like Kevin Spacey believing in me, so I pushed myself and I did it, you know? So at least I had a go.”

This was characteristic understatement for a performance described by the critics as “admirable”, “irresistible” and “extraordinary.” And while researching the role of a young Cilla Black in ITV’s eponymous drama, Smith admitted that she had found herself wishing “I was half as strong as she was at my age. But I mean, really. I’m not saving lives, am I?”

Smith’s pitch perfect performance as Cilla Black - Television Stills
Smith’s pitch perfect performance as Cilla Black - Television Stills

There was nothing in her upbringing responsible for sowing the seeds of this self-doubt, she insisted, joking that she “was dragged up right by proper salt-of-the-earth parents.” At the age of six she joined them – a country and western duo known as The Daltons – and her two brothers Julian and Damian on stage, before being urged to audition for the National Youth Music Theatre at 11 by her drama teacher. By the time she was 16, Smith had decided that acting was the only option. “I’m no good at anything else,” she told me. “I’m quite thick, you see.”

Having spent her 20s playing, as she put it, “scrubs, chavs or slappers” in sitcoms such as Two Pints of Lager and a Packet of Crisps, Benidorm and Gavin & Stacey, and been anointed by the tabloids as their wholesome new ‘girl next door’ – one who was as at home singing with her parents at a Doncaster working men’s club as she was on a West End stage – Smith hadn’t been convinced that she could move on to the heavyweight work subsequently offered to her. No amount of A-list champions cherry-picking roles for her (Dustin Hoffman was so moved by her performance in Terence Rattigan’s Flare Path that he cast her in his directorial debut, Quartet), or awards received, were able to bolster her ego. “Sometimes,” she told me with a small smile, “I think about just running away and opening a dog shelter abroad.”

What a loss that would have been for us – and for her industry. But as Smith pushed on with a series of acclaimed TV roles in ITV’s Black Work and the BBC’s The Moorside, the tabloids began to pick holes in their golden girl – and she began quietly falling apart.

Asked to pinpoint the moment her anxiety began to get the better of her, Smith told one that it went as far back as 2011, when she suddenly forgot her lines onstage. “This had never happened to me before. And all the girls on stage are giggling... I remember I stayed in an American accent and said: ‘Oh my God, I forgot my line.’ And the place erupted.” Some actors would have brushed it off, “but it really freaked me out,” she confessed. “My head started playing these tricks.”

Smith in The Royle Family back in 2000 - Television Stills
Smith in The Royle Family back in 2000 - Television Stills

According to one industry source, “living up to her tabloid darling image only increased the pressure Sheridan had always put on herself.” In her own words Smith described how she “felt like a duck. Floating along fine but kicking like mad underneath. I know that sounds dramatic now. But the anxiety absolutely spiralled out of control.”

Smith was told by one doctor that she was bipolar, while another insisted it was generalised anxiety disorder and prescribed anti-anxiety tablets, “which became a nightmare, because I needed more and more and more.” And with no enduring boyfriend to keep her steady and her beloved father diagnosed with cancer in 2015, things came to a head when Smith was starring as the lead in a London stage revival of Funny Girl.

Her father’s illness, which turned out to be terminal, would have been painful enough without the memories it triggered of her older brother, Julian, who died of cancer at 18. “I just fell apart,” said Sheridan in 2018. “I was running away from a lot, straight to the bottom of a bottle.” After coming back to Funny Girl too soon from a leave of absence, much was made of the actress “slurring her lines” one night. “A few glasses of technical difficulties,” Graham Norton joked at the Bafta awards in May that year.

She pulled out of multiple performances – criticism of which took her to social media, where she fired off a series of expletive-laden tweets at her online naysayers.

A much-needed break from the limelight followed, and paid off: she moved back to her home town in Yorkshire with insurance broker ex-fiancé, Jamie Horn – the father of her 17-month-old baby boy, Billy – and went on an alcohol hiatus in 2019, sharing the details of her hard-won recovery in last year’s ITV documentary, Becoming Mum. “I know I’m so much better not drinking,” she said after first toning down her booze consumption, adding that medication has kept her anxiety at bay, too.

Smith with current partner Alex Lawler - Ricky Vigil M
Smith with current partner Alex Lawler - Ricky Vigil M

Still, the headlines have yet to abate – another this week revealed that she has put the £1.5 million Essex barn conversion she has lived in for less than a year on the market. “This year has been a whirlwind to say the least,” she said two weeks ago, admitting that “there’s been a lot of ups and downs.” Hopefully there will be more to come of the former – Smith is currently in a relationship with Alex Lawler, an actor she first dated two decades ago, and will soon be a judge on Starstruck, a new Stars In Their Eyes-style show, as well as starring in dramas from The Railway Children Return to the BBC’s The Barking Murders.

“Sheridan’s the genuine article,” confirms actress and singer Amanda Holden, who recorded the famous Chess duet, I Know Him So Well, with Smith for her own album last year. “There’s no limit to what someone with her work ethic and talents can achieve.”