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My acting days are over
Kathy Burke had it all as an actress – critical acclaim, a top award at Cannes, and a place in the nation’s heart as Waynetta Slob. But now she has found a new passion, she tells Jasper Rees The Daily Telegraph Kathy Burke was, for a period in the 1990s, a sort of cockney working-class Judi Dench. Straddling the broad comedy of the television sketch show Harry Enfield and Chums and the unflinching realism of Gary Oldman’s movie Nil By Mouth, for which she won a best actress award at Cannes in 1997, she was one of those much loved performers everyone got used to always being around. When an…
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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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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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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…
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Kathy comes home
The Irish Post London-Irish actress Kathy Burke has popped up again on our TV screens, this time in the form of an orange-bewigged flatmate nightmare hunting for a man. Joe Crilly reports. Gimme Gimme Gimme is an odd couple scenario scripted by acclaimed playwright Jonathan Harvey. Kathy Burke plays down-at-heel Linda, who is hungry for love and passion. She shares a flat with her gay friend, Tom, played by James Dreyfus, who also hankers after the ideal mate, like the lyrics of the Abba song, ‘Gimme gimme gimme a man after midnight’. In last week’s first episode Linda, discovering a strange man in their flat after a night on the town,…
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The gay, the sad and the ugly
Kathy Burke says she knows her place when it comes to casting. And it’s not among the beautiful people. The Independent If you thought that Waynetta was a slob, Linda, the character Kathy Burke plays in a new BBC2 sitcom, Gimme, Gimme, Gimme, is even more gross than the shell-suited, chain-smoking wife of Wayne she inhabits for Harry Enfield and Chums. Life for Linda and her gay flatmate Tom (James Dreyfus from The Thin Blue Line) is one long sex, drugs and rock’n’roll perma-bender. Done up in a ginger fright-wig and white-rimmed clown glasses, Linda gets so out of it her only way of knowing whether she ended the blinder…
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Meet the romantic lead in the new Merchant-Ivory film. (Just kidding)
The Observer Common sense and Equity unemployment statistics prove acting is a madly competitive business. Yet the way actors tell it, this same profession breeds nothing but solidarity, tolerance and mutual admiration among its members. Only occasionally does someone break rank. In a letter to the London magazine Time Out last October, replying to comments made in an interview by Helena Bonham Carter, the actress Kathy Burke wrote: ‘As a lifelong member of the non-pretty working classes, I would like to say to Helena Bonham Carter (wholly pledged member of the very pretty upper-middle classes): shut up you stupid c-.’ But The Observer has enough scruples about printing the f-word, let alone the c-word.…
