• Kathy Burke. Pic by Clara Molden
    Articles,  Media

    Kathy Burke: ‘A national treasure? I’m the opposite!’

    After four near-death moments, Kathy Burke is returning to directing – and acting. The Telegraph Kathy Burke keeps being mistaken for someone quite different. But it’s not a problem. In fact, she couldn’t be happier about it. The director and actress, widely loved for playing such roles as Perry (from Kevin and Perry) and Waynetta Slob (catchphrase: “I am smokin’ a fag!”) alongside Harry Enfield, takes up the story. “People come up to me all the time and say, ‘All right, Perry? How’s Kevin?’ It could be annoying, but I’m actually really glad. I’m knocking on 50, and I’m still getting recognised for playing a 14-year-old boy. It makes me…

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  • News

    (Not) Getting smaller

    Well, the reviews for Smaller are in (theatre of course doesn’t even exist outside of London, according to the media) – and it’s not good news. People don’t like it. The kindest has been three stars out of five; the cruelest one star. The FT gave it two stars but savaged it, starting with the line: “As dismal evenings in the theatre go, Smaller is not offensive – merely slow, obvious and banal.” The general feeling is that the writer – TV soap author Carmel Morgan – has extended a particularly traumatic episode into a full play. It left quite a few critics depressed – “remorselessly bleak” said The Telegraph. And yet, as ever, everyone praises Kathy Burke as director. It…

  • News

    Bloody hell

    The God of Hell press reviews have come in and well… there’s good news and bad news. The bad news is that no one likes it. The Telegraph has been the most forthright, calling it a “dismayingly glib piece of right-on, left-wing paranoia”. Most of the others have found the satire a bit, well, obvious. The Stage says: “as is often the case with those who rail against the establishment, he goes a bit too far”. And so on and so forth. The good news is that the “he” in the last quote refers to the writer, well-known US playwright Sam Shepard. All the reviews just don’t like the play. However, they are…

  • Hampstead Theater
    News

    Love bites

    Kathy is directing the new play by Nick Stafford, Love Me Tonight, at the Hampstead Theatre, London from 21 October to 20 November. Starring Amanda Abbington, Linda Bassett, Hugh Ross and Nicolas Tennant, the play is about a family trying to find lost love with one another after the funeral of its youngest son. For more information and to buy tickets, go to the Hampstead Theatre’s website here. To promote the play, Kathy has embarked on another press tour and a new piece by the Telegraph has been added to the media section in which she reveals that the acting bug has still to bite her, years after she gave it up to concentrate…

  • Articles,  Media

    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…

  • Articles,  Media

    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,…