The Stage

Peake of her powers - Maxine Peake

Published Friday 5 August 2005 at 10:45 by Liz Thomas

From school dinners to the miners’ strike and from the National Theatre to a Manchester council estate, there aren’t many topics or locations Maxine Peake hasn’t covered in the course of her acting career so far, writes Liz Thomas

Sporting the shock of white-blonde hair that fans of Channel 4’s critically acclaimed Shameless will instantly recognise, Peake is in the middle of filming the third series of Paul Abbott’s Bafta-winning drama.

The show, made by the independent production house Company Pictures, has seen its popularity soar both with audiences and critics, picking up a host of gongs at every top award ceremony and earning creator Abbott a position in the holy trinity of UK screenwriting, alongside Russell T Davies and Jimmy McGovern.

Peake says: “Shameless has been such a success because it is family drama with a twist. Matt Jones, the producer, once described it as The Waltons on acid and I think that’s spot on. The show is daft and dark, very funny and very honest. It has great writing and fantastic characters. What more would you need?”

She is flying high at the moment with offers for stage and screen but she readily admits that starting out was incredibly tough. She arrived at RADA aged 21 having applied to an assortment of other drama schools for the three years previous with no luck. “It was the first time I auditioned for RADA. I thought I’d try as everywhere else had said no. I remember my mum saying that I was either very thick-skinned or very stupid,” she explains.

Whatever Peake might have been, her commitment paid off almost immediately. She bagged an agent in her final year and hasn’t really looked back. She says: “There was interest from two agents, I remember everyone else seemed to have agents dropping all over them but it just wasn’t like that for me. Still, a little while before I graduated I remember getting a call for an interview with Victoria Wood for her new sitcom. I just thought, ‘oh my god I’m just never going to get it’. But I did. Things just couldn’t have worked out better. I was all prepared to leave drama school and go and work in a bar.”

The new show was Wood’s BBC1 comedy Dinnerladies and Peake starred in it for two series, in between which she managed a stint in the West End, starring in Bill Kenwright and Thelma Holt’s production of Miss Julie.

She adds: “I met Thelma Holt when I was at university and we got chatting. When she was doing the casting for the show I guess she just thought of me. I really love the stage so it was perfect.”

After the second series of Dinnerladies she went off to the National for 18 months and starred in Trevor Nunn’s adaptation of Chekhov’s classic The Cherry Orchard. This was followed by stints at The Royal Court and theatres all over the north west.

Talented as she is, Peake also seems to have a knack for impressing the right people at the right time. She counts among her friends the man who helped re-invent Doctor Who for the next generation, Christopher Eccleston, after starring with him at the West Yorkshire Playhouse. She says: “He got the part and… well he recommended me for the part of Ophelia. We’d worked together before so that was that.”

Along the way there have been bit parts in shows such as Dalziel and Pascoe and Holby City. She also starred with fellow Shameless actor James McEvoy in cult BBC2 comedy Early Doors and in comedy drama Clocking Off, which was also written by Abbott.

Then of course came Shameless, which she is clearly still enamoured with, but Peake has been busy in between series as well. She worked alongside Robson Green and Mark Benton in cheesy festive comedy Christmas Lights. She laughs: “That’s now been turned into a series - I think its called Northern Lights - but they are filming it now so that pretty much ruled me out.”

More recently she starred in BBC1 drama, Faith, which marked the 20th anniversary of the end of miners’ strike. The show prompted a scathing attack on the Corporation for “institutional left-wing bias” from John Whittingdale, the then Tory shadow minister for culture, media and sport. Peake, however, defends the Beeb’s decision to run the programme just weeks before the general election, saying that if anything the story was a diluted interpretation of events of the day.

Her pale, elfin features seem to have been ideal for an assortment of roles and while she admits that at times the casting process can border on the insulting, for the most part it has kept her busy with challenging parts. She laughs: “I’m never going to be the beautiful romantic lead but it has never really bothered me. I think at drama at school I realised I kept getting cast for these parts where everyone is over 60 and you kind of think, ‘Why? I’m 21, do I look like an old woman?’ With casting notes you are offered, it might say things about the character like ‘ugly’, ‘odd-looking’ or ‘is 26 but looks ten years older’. At first I think I could cry but you have to get over it because it means there is a range of things that you can get involved in.”

Taking that to its logical conclusion, Peake is keen to put herself forward for what might be her toughest and most controversial, challenge yet. She says: “Obviously I would like to do some more theatre. But I’ve heard there is to be a drama about Myra Hindley, and as an actress, she is a character that I would want to tackle.”