Sharon D Clarke wasn’t expecting to win an Olivier award for best actress. “It’s a joy,” she says in the flush of the morning after. “I was among ladies who are at the top of their game. I was glad to be in the category, and glad I had been noticed but never in a million years did I think I would win.”
Then again, she didn’t expect to win her first Olivier in 2014 either (“‘shocked’ is not the right word”). That one was for a supporting role in The Amen Corner. Another came last year, for her performance in the musical, Caroline, Or Change. With this third notch, she has become the first person to be nominated in all four performing categories of the Oliviers, winning the latest honour for her sensational turn as Linda Loman in Marianne Elliott and Miranda Cromwell’s Death of a Salesman at the Young Vic in London.
So why is she so surprised when she has such fine form? “Because I’m just a girl from Tottenham,” she says, and laughs lavishly. She may well be that – she was raised in London by her Jamaican-born parents – but she is so much more besides. If her fellow nominees (Hayley Atwell, Phoebe Waller-Bridge and Juliet Stevenson) are at the top of their game, Clarke is also undoubtedly at the height of her powers. She has spent more than three decades in the entertainment industry, steadily earning acclaim across the board.
This particular Olivier is especially appreciated when set against the past eight months of pandemic uncertainty, both for her industry and, she will admit, for her own livelihood. Clarke was in New York in March, when the Covid-19 crisis struck. She was in the last days of rehearsals for the transfer of Caroline, Or Change – the show was due to open the day after Broadway switched off its lights. She returned to London with a suddenly empty diary. Friends in the industry have since lost their homes.
But could an actor and singer as seasoned – and as decorated – as Clarke really feel frightened about her future? “Of course I was. I don’t think the wider public really understands what’s happening in theatre. There are people on their knees. Not a penny came in until June. Then I got a voiceover job and thought ‘Thank God’.”
Other creative projects rolled in after that, from charity gigs to online plays including the forthcoming What a Carve Up!, and monologues such as First, Do No Harm, written by the Booker prize winner, Bernardine Evaristo, that Clarke performed at the Old Vic in London. Clarke’s wife, Susie McKenna, who is an associate director at the Kiln theatre in London, continued to work in lockdown but “that was all firefighting”.
Clarke feels that Covid-19 has already left the industry irrevocably lesser than it was a few months ago. “It will be different when we come back because we will have lost people. People are passing but buildings are passing, too, from this disease.”
Clarke emanates personality in every role she plays, and she does the same on the other end of the phone, bubbling over with warmth even when sounding serious notes. She speaks of those she has met in the business as family, including McKenna, with whom she got together while working on Cinderella at the Hackney Empire in 1999.
What Clarke welcomed most in Elliott’s adaptation of Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman in which the Jewish Loman family, have become African Americans, was the ingenious way that she turned a canonical text into a drama that spoke its themes differently, and directly to people of colour. “To put in characters like us, who had never been considered for those roles, makes you look at the script from a different, enriched perspective. Research was done to show that this family could have existed, that they could have been among the first to drive a car, and Willy Loman among those striving but never getting past that glass ceiling, and feeling emasculated as a black American.”
Wasn’t there also something prescient in the play’s attentiveness to the ongoing failings in the US around race, too, given what came earlier this summer with George Floyd’s killing? Does she feel that that the play was timely in its reflections on how far – or otherwise – the US has come since slavery and the civil rights movement?
“We can’t lay all of this at America’s door,” says Clarke. “It’s quite easy for British people to say that this is not our problem, it’s their problem. It’s an American play but I wouldn’t say, as a black British person, that I think this is just an American problem.”
Clarke speaks about black British history and the lacunae in our national stories which leave out both black achievement and the nation’s collaboration with international slavery. She speaks too of the long history of racial injustice and inequality: “This talk of George Floyd,” she says emphatically and then interrupts herself. “I can’t speak about it without getting emotional. All this talk about how it has opened people’s eyes – I find it hard because he is another black man in a long line of black men, women, children, to have died over the last year, the last 10 years, the last 100 years. It’s great that we seem to be at a turning point and that his death has been a catalyst for some to stand up and say ‘I have got to do something’. But it’s not new. It’s old news.”
The same goes for calls for greater inclusivity in the entertainment industry, she says. She remembers going to her first Olivier awards ceremony in 1995 when sheand Adrian Lester were the only black people in attendance. She has been calling for change since then, but never stopped experiencing casual racism. Industry professionals, directors, fellow actors, have said “some completely foolish things to me about skin, about hair. You can’t just touch my hair, and please don’t ask me if I wash it. There are the times you have the strength to call it out, and there are times you think that if you say something you will end up killing someone.”
What Floyd’s death and the subsequent revival of the Black Lives Matter movement has done for the industry is allowed for an open discussion. “Before we bit our tongues,” she says, for fear of the consequences. Now, “the BBC is talking to black performers. There are surveys about hair and makeup. It has allowed black and brown people to not feel like the only person on the set floor that’s having to deal with all that shit. And at the end of the day, we can’t do it alone. We have to have the allies to cleave to and to walk beside.”
Clarke’s career has been purposefully eclectic – she has glided between theatre and television, including a three-year tenure on Holby City, while fans of 90s house music might remember her band Nomad. Her love of it all began aged six, when a friend introduced her to the Ivy Travers Dance School, in Clapton, London. She went to Anna Scher’s drama school after that and while she knew she wanted to pursue a career in acting, she was encouraged by her parents to line up a plan B, just in case.
With that in mind, she signed up for social work, which, she says, suited her personality. “I’m one of those people that others tell their woes. I would be that girl in the school toilet who would say ‘You’re not dying. That’s just your period.’” Plan B was never activated; she finished social work college, aged 18, on a Friday and had an acting job by the following Monday. She didn’t even have an Equity card at the time, but Jude Kelly, then at the Battersea Arts Centre, employed her and furnished her with union membership.
Clarke’s father, a carpenter, and her mother, a seamstress with an extraordinary singing voice, were hugely supportive. In fact, it was her mother who inspired her singing. “She was my first vocal coach,” she says. Growing up, she saw very few people like her on television. “It was before Lenny Henry arrived, when there was just a [black] character in Pippin, Floella Benjamin, and Derek Griffiths.”
That lack of diversity played out in her own early television experience of typecasting of the starkest kind, when she was offered the role of a nurse with very few speaking lines, over and over again. “I got fed up. I thought ‘I didn’t come into television to be just a nurse’.” Theatre, by comparison, offered her broader scope and when she returned to TV after making her mark on stage, she received more textured parts, such as in the series Informer “where you have a black woman with locs, dressed in a tweed suit.”
Whatever the failings of her industry, Clarke feels proud and fortunate for the roles she has landed – “I have surpassed anything I could have imagined as my 15-year-old self”. So now that she has conquered the stage, what next? “More of it,” she says, and laughs her rich laugh. “I want more great theatrical roles. More good TV. I want to do films. I want to work with Quincy Jones, have a concert at the Royal Albert Hall, play the Brixton Academy. I want to do it all.”