Happy Valley star Sarah Lancashire: From humble beginnings to being lauded as UK’s ‘Meryl Streep’

Sarah Lancashire graced our television screens last night as matriarch Sergeant Catherine Cawood in the opening episode of the third and final series of Happy Valley.

The long-awaited return of Sally Wainwright’s gripping crime drama opened to five-star reviews as viewers rejoiced that ‘Sarah Lancashire is back on our screens’.

Set in Calder Valley, West Yorkshire, her character plays a no-nonsense police officer fighting crime in her community, while also battling her own personal demons.

The multi-award winning show has won legions of fans in Lancashire, with some comparing her to Britain’s Meryl Streep, and others hailing Catherine Cawood as “the greatest female character to ever appear on television.”

Lancashire rose to fame as a national treasure on the soap opera Coronation Street, where she played the ditzy waitress Raquel Wolstenhulme from 1991 to 1996.

She then went on to appear in Where the Heart Is, Last Tango in Halifax, Kiri, The Accident and most recently as TV chef Julia Child on the HBO series Julia, which also won her fans across the pond.

But the Oldham-born actress, 58, came from humble beginnings, and before her ‘big break’ in acting, she starred in local stage productions and worked as a drama teacher to stay afloat financially ahead of jobs.

Born in 1964, her father Geoffrey was a television writer and her mother Hilda worked as her personal assistant.

As a teenager, Lancashire had little interest in acting and originally set out to work behind the scenes on television.

At the age of 18, he won a place at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama, where his passion for acting was ignited.

She graduated in 1986, and after being turned down at several repertory theaters, Howard Lloyd-Lewis, director of the Manchester Library Theater Company, gave her her first role.

He starred in two plays, Pacific Overtures and Beauty Game, describing this period as “the beginning of my acting career”.

Despite aspirations to make it big, early in her career she found large gaps between stage appearances and worked as a drama teacher to stay afloat financially.

But things were about to change. In 1990, Lancashire got her ‘big break’ of her playing the role of Linda in a production of Willy Russell’s Blood Brothers at the Albery Theater in London’s West End.

two weeks later finishing her run on Blood Brothers, Lancashire auditioned to play Raquel Wolstenhulme in Coronation Street, where she would play the colleague of supermarket clerk Curly Watts, played by Kevin Kennedy.

After a stint as a model, her character became the much-loved ditzy waitress at Rover’s Return, then had a failed romance with Des Barnes, Weatherfield’s resident lothario.

He married Curly and became Raquel Watts, but left him in 1996 to pursue a aromatherapy work in Kuala Lumpur.

After her departure from Corrie, Lancashire joined the cast of ITV’s Where The Heart, where she played the role of district nurse Ruth Goddard.

To the delight of viewers, she returned to Weatherfield as Raquel for the last time in 2000 during a New Year’s special to demand a divorce from Curly so she could marry her French lover.

In the same year, she became the first actress to sign a £1.3 million ‘golden handcuffs’ contract with ITV, meaning that for two years she was only able to star in ITV productions.

At the time, the deal made Lancashire the highest paid actress on British television.

In the years following his contract with ITV, he starred in numerous plays and films, including The Bill, Wuthering Heights, Doctor Who, Gentlemen’s Relish, Skins and Dad’s Army.

When Happy Valley first hit screens in 2014, the show was an instant hit, grabbing more than eight million viewers and winning Baftas for Best Drama and Best Screenplay.

Raising her grandson Ryan after the suicide of her daughter Becky, Sergeant Catherine Cawood must keep him safe from his biological father, local villain Tommy Lee Royce, played by McMafia star James Norton.

The second series also saw Lancashire win a Bafta for Best Actress, and in the same year she was awarded an OBE for Services to Drama.

Nearly seven years after the previous Happy Valley series ended, the grandmother played by Sarah Lancashire is still stemming the tide of drugs and violence in her West Yorkshire town.

No doubt set to receive more awards as the six-part series comes to a close, her portrayal of Catherine Cawood has also earned her a loyal fan base across the pond after the show aired on Netflix in the US. .

Three Happy Valley series were always planned with one and two airing just two years apart.

Wainwright and Lancashire always planned for a gap between the final series, to allow time for the characters to grow, but much to viewers’ frustration, the Covid-19 pandemic added another year to the wait.

Happy Valley’s final series opener airing on New Year’s Day was praised for bringing back the magic of the ‘breakthrough’ show, as it garnered five-star reviews across the board.