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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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Burke’s peerage
The Times The perfect connections: Gary Oldman, Harry Enfield, Meryl Streep. The perfect credentials: best actress gong, Time Out award, adoring public. Yet Kathy Burke is a lady unafraid to act unladylike. Two weeks ago, Kathy Burke was shopping in Waitrose on London’s Holloway Road. As she nudged her trolley along the aisles of fresh fruit, pet food and microwave dinners, she was stopped by a series of strangers. Some told the 34-year-old actress how much they laughed at her sex starved, wig-wearing harridan in Gimme, Gimme, Gimme, the sitcom which has just finished its successful run on BBC2; others, including one slightly stiff middle-aged man, congratulated Burke on her recent portrayal of…
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Bold as brass, that’s our Kathy
The Evening Standard ‘I think if I was a bloke I’d be quite f***ed up because I’ve got a lot of male in me. It’s because I’m a bird that I’m not. Which is just as well, really.’ Kathy Burke lights another ciggie and looks across Old Compton Street to the door of a prominent sex shop. She’s people watching – one of her favourite pastimes – from her usual table in a Soho café. ‘We sometimes catch the eye of some bloke coming out. They always look embarrassed.’ Burke has been described as a ‘national treasure’. And ‘the best British character actress of her generation’. And ‘Rita the Rottweiler’.…
