Articles
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Kathy comes home
The Observer When I first decided to take off the tap shoes and concentrate on theatre directing, Dominic Dromgoole got in touch to ask if I’d like to do something with Oxford Stage Company. My reaction was negative. What I enjoy most about directing is the chance of working things out with the writer, plus I need their approval and I like the chat. I didn’t want to work on dry, old plays written by the dry, old dead. Luckily for me, he ignored my ignorance, phoned back a year later and said: ‘What about The Quare Fellow by Brendan Behan? It’s not been done for 20 years, bit neglected.…
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Kathy Burke and her quare fellow
Kathy Burke is one of our most popular actresses. Winner of the Best Actress Award at the prestigious Cannes Film Festival in 1997 for Gary Oldman’s lacerating Nil by Mouth, regular nominee and award winner in the TV comedy stakes, she could by now be pulling in the mega-bucks. She also taught me, “don’t just be involved as an actor in this business. Try and branch out and understand the other side of things”.’ Instead, here she is on a grey January evening, sitting in the bare dressing room of London’s famous Old Vic Theatre, solemn-faced, chain-smoking – a far cry from her larger-than-life comic creations – love-lorn Linda of Gimme Gimme…
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Kathy Burke: Why I’m giving up acting
Kathy Burke, one of this country’s best-loved character actresses, is directing her first West End play. She tells James Rampton about the frustrations of being an actor and why she decided to quit The Independent Five years ago, Kathy Burke was being taken in Luc Besson’s private jet to the Cannes Film Festival to pick up her Best Actress Award for her stunning performance as the battered wife in Nil by Mouth. Hollywood producers were door-stepping her like so many double-glazing salesmen. This week, she is to be found in the rather more humble surroundings of a run-down church hall normally used by an Islington Scout group. But she couldn’t be…
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60-second interview: Kathy Burke
The Metro Kathy Burke is probably the UK’s most versatile actress; whether playing Linda in Gimme Gimme Gimme or portraying a victim of domestic violence in Nil By Mouth, the plaudits are all hers. Yet now she’s turned to her other love, and has her West End directorial debut with Betty, starring Geraldine McNulty at the Vaudeville Theatre. How crazy is it seeing yourself on screen?It’s horrible. People started to get really body-conscious when camcorders came along. They suddenly saw what they really looked like. You look in the mirror and see what you want to see but when you find out how other people see you, it’s a bit of a shock. Is…
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London’s most famous Burke
The Evening Standard Kathy Burke has been called a national treasure so many times that they might as well erect a monument to her. So it is a matter of some concern when one of the very few Brits to have won the prestigious Best Actress award at Cannes, for Nil By Mouth, declares that she’s had enough of acting. The truth is that her work on screen has slightly overshadowed her other life as a playwright and a theatre director. But next week, at the Royal Court, Burke-fanciers will be able to see the results of her directorial work on stage with a new Nick Grosso play, Kosher Harry. Having directed…
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‘I’d see her every day of my life if I could’
Ray Winstone and Kathy Burke get on like a house on fire. But does he really want to make a blue movie with her? Rupert Smith meets them The Guardian “Do you smoke?” Kathy Burke is generous with her fags; she and Ray Winstone have both got one on the go, and she’s eager to thicken the atmosphere. “No? Well, you do now.” An interview with Burke and Winstone, the pearly king and queen of British acting, is an exercise in passive smoking. It also becomes clear, after a few minutes, that the fizzing liquid they are guzzling with such relish after a hard day’s rehearsal is not Perrier. The main ingredient…
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Kathy comes home
…and brings Nigel Slater with her. Her kitchen may be full of Waynetta’s fag smoke and cockney vowels, but actress Kathy Burke is no slob when it comes to cooking, and an even bigger surprise – she’s a vegetarian The Observer ‘The night my dad died, I found myself in the kitchen at three o’clock in the morning, making fried egg sandwiches with tomato ketchup. The thing is, I had to go to the all-night to get the plastic bread and the ketchup because I never eat that sort of crap. It was something I hadn’t done since I was a kid – you know, making myself a white-bread fried-egg…
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Beautiful things: Kathy Burke and Jonathan Harvey
The Independent It’s official. Kathy Burke is a national treasure. Stephen Fry confirmed as much in his appearance last week on BBC2’s Room 101. Wishing to condemn Room 101 to Room 101, he proposed an alternative repository for everything fluffy in life: Room Lovely. The very first thing he suggested placing in Room Lovely was Kathy Burke. “She’s just great,” Fry rhapsodised. “She’s got everything that’s great about being great. She’s incredibly clever and charming – she writes brilliant plays as well as being a wonderful actress and extremely amusing. If she appears on television or in a film, we immediately think ‘oh great’. And she’s gutsy. If I was a woman, she’d be…
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Patron saint of underdogs
The Telegraph Kathy Burke is on her way to becoming an institution. As she puts it: “I’ve got one of those ‘national treasure’ labels.” The 36-year-old actress is often met with smiles from passers-by and a cheery “All right, Kaff?”. Burke has been cherished for some time. Appearing on TV with Harry Enfield throughout the 1990s made her a household name, her gallery of unlovelies inspiring widespread feelings of revulsion and adulation. Most memorably, she gave us Waynetta Slob, fag-in-mouth wife of Enfield’s foul, beer-bellied Wayne; Perry, mumbling sidekick to the acned adolescent monster Kevin; and Lulu, the dribbling baby sister of Enfield’s vindictive toddler Harry. It wasn’t until 1997,…
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Kathy goes a stage beyond
The Evening Standard If I had been around 100 years ago, I would have been a male impersonator in the music halls, says Kathy Burke. Instead, the 21st century’s answer to Vesta Tilley has strutted her trousered stuff as the smaller, but stroppier, half of that wonderfully dopey duo Kevin and Perry for the delectation of the telly-watching nation. “It’s a great liberation for a woman to play a man’s role: I’ve been asked to play a couple of blokes on telly since Perry, and I was quite flattered, really. I said no because physically it’s quite painful, know what I mean?” she adds, miming an excruciating clamp-down in the…
