Sarah Parish: ‘I have a look about me that says death... I’m not a fluffy bunny’

The star of ITV’s detective hit ‘Bancroft’ talks to Charlotte Cripps about why the makers wanted to shock the British public by casting her, her lack of confidence at the start of her career and overcoming personal tragedy

Sarah Parish who is now arguably the doyenne of alpha-female roles is returning in ITV’s ‘Bancroft’ as the ruthless police detective and killer (AGF/Rex)

“Show business is not life or death. We are just dressing up and pretending to be other people,” says Sarah Parish. “I take my career very seriously – but I draw a line at certain things. That is probably why I’ve never worked in America – I just can’t buy into how ridiculously seriously they take it.”

Clearly happier to remain on British TV, rather than cross the pond, Parish is returning to our screens from New Year’s Day in ITV’s hit psychological thriller Bancroft, as the ruthless Elizabeth Bancroft – a respected police detective, who is really a cold-blooded killer. The show, originally planned for ITV Encore, became a runaway success in 2017, when it replaced Hatton Garden, which was pulled from the ITV schedule, at the last minute.

Much of that is down to Parish, one of those rare British TV actors, like Martin Clunes and Sarah Lancashire, whose performances almost always strike a chord with viewers. Whether she is playing a steely TV executive in the comedy W1A, the brittle, high-living Cath Atwood in the crime drama Broadchurch or the wife of a brain-damaged man alongside David Tennant in Tony Marchant’s TV drama Recovery, she’s just at home diving into heartbreaking emotion, as she is at turning icy and teetering on the brink of madness, as in Bancroft, her finest performance to date.

DCI Elizabeth Bancroft is her best performance to date (ITV/Rex)

The series became one of ITV’s biggest new dramas of 2017, despite little press coverage. Some viewers at first mistook Parish for Doctor Foster’s Suranne Jones – such was the shock at seeing Parish in such a violent role – and the first series ended with the shock twist that Bancroft was having an affair with Lily Sacofsky’s Laura, whom she killed.

“I think what people liked about it is that it is quite melodramatic and theatrical – so it isn’t that gritty realism that you get in Line of Duty – it is slightly more colourful,” says Parish from her house in a little village outside Winchester, where she lives with her actor husband James Murray. They met on the set of BBC’s hairdressing drama Cutting It, married in 2007 and have a daughter Nell, aged 10.

Parish, 51, who refers to herself as a “late starter” in both her career and private life, is now arguably the doyenne of alpha-female roles.

She is reprising her role of the powerful Lucrezia Tornabuoni in Netflix’s lavish Medici family saga, Medici, which returns for its third season in the new year. It’s set in 15th-century Renaissance Florence; Lucrezia is Lorenzo de Medici’s mother and instrumental to the rise of the Medici.

She also has a role in the forthcoming Lena Dunham-produced HBO show Industry, an eight-part banking-crisis drama, which is shrouded in secrecy.

Parish takes her work in her stride these days since her perspective on life changed suddenly. In 2009, her baby daughter Ella-Jayne died at eight months old, after being diagnosed with a rare genetic disorder Rubinstein-Taybi syndrome.

Until the tragedy, like many actors, she had put herself under “huge amounts of pressure to please other people”, she says. “At the end of the day it is just nothing – it’s transient.”

“You have a better understanding of perspective when you go through something that is so majorly horrendous. Everything slots into place and although it’s tragic I had to go through something like that to get where I am now, it is a blessing.”

Parish got through it by “slowing right down” and “taking it five minutes at a time”. “It was the only way I could handle it. But your body and mind has an amazing way of recovering,” she says. “I think back and I can’t really emotionally connect to it any more.”

It helped when she discovered she was pregnant with her second child at the age of 41, a few months after the death of Ella-Jayne.

Parish and Murray also threw themselves into their charity – the Murray Parish Trust in 2014 – raising £5.2m to build an intensive care unit at Southampton General Hospital, which was finished last year. Now they are attempting to raise £5.5m for an iMRI machine, which will be able to create images of a child’s brain during surgery.

Parish grew up in Yeovil, Somerset, the youngest of three siblings. Her father Paul was a helicopter engineer and her mother Thelma a headteacher, who ran a theatre group.

Her parents had always loved performing. Her dad had formed a successful singing quartet, The Gay Bachelors, in London, where he met Sarah’s mum, who joined the group for concerts.

She was the stern TV executive Anna Rampton in the BBCs 'W1A' who only says “yes”, “no” or “the fact is” to hide her incompetence at the job (BBC)

But Thelma married the wrong “bachelor”, before realising she was actually in love with Phil, and they eloped to Somerset to avoid a scandal.

Their daughter wanted to be a ballet dancer but, aged 11, Parish failed her audition at the Royal Ballet School. It was on a family trip to see the musical Sweeney Todd in the West End, in a production that starred Denis Quilley and Sheila Hancock, that she had a light bulb moment and realised she wanted to act.

She left Preston School, a local comprehensive and attended Yeovil College to do her A-levels, before coming to London aged 17, where she went to the Academy of Live and Recorded Arts.

Her twenties were plagued with self-doubt – “I was a bag of nerves,” she says. “I think it has changed now,” she adds, “but when I went to an audition, it was always the Rada or Drama Centre person who got the job. As soon as they walked into the room, they were laden with confidence. I didn’t know how to be like that. I just automatically thought that other people were better than me.”

Her first foray in TV was for a Boddingtons beer advert when she was 26, playing Vera sunbathing on a beach in Blackpool, who likes being massaged with chip fat.

“It would never happen now, but I remember my agent saying you’ve got to go for an audition for an advert and you have to go wearing a bikini,” recalls Parish.

“I changed into it in the toilet. I had to walk into a room with a bunch of blokes in this bikini and a pair of high heels and say lots of funny northern things.”

She played receptionist Dawn Rudge in 'Peak Practice' for two years from 1997 (ITV/Rex)

It led to a lot of roles as northern women – despite the fact she was from the West Country – including receptionist Dawn Rudge in Peak Practice, the Nineties ITV drama about a GP surgery in Cardale; ambitious, driven hair salon-owner Allie Henshall in BBC1’s Cutting It; and bored housewife Natalie Holden in the musical drama series Blackpool (2004), which starred David Morrissey and David Tennant.

She once jokingly described her relationship with Tennant as like “George and Mildred” – the ill-matched married couple in the 1970s sitcom – because she can’t seem to get away from working with him. “We just start where we left off,” she says. “But our working together is quite coincidental.”

Apart from Blackpool, Recovery, and Broadchurch, in which Tennant starred as DI Alec Hardy, she appeared with him in the 2006 Doctor Who Christmas special episode The Runaway Bride as the Empress of the Racnoss – a super-sized red spider alien intent on terrorising planet earth, then in the 2017 romantic-comedy, You, Me and Him, as the northerner Mrs Jones who can’t accept her daughter is a lesbian. ​

As the high-living and brittle Cath Atwood in ITV's third series of 'Broadchurch' (ITV)

Parish considers her role in Hearts and Bones, which aired on BBC1 in 2000, as her breakthrough role. It explored the lives, loves and careers of a group of friends – played by Parish, Damian Lewis, Dervla Kirwan, Amanda Holden and Andrew Scarborough – who move to London from Coventry.

“It was the first thing where people thought, ‘Oh she is a bit interesting,’” says Parish.

Amanda Holden as Mia, Sarah Parish as Allie and Angela Griffin as Darcey in the BBCs salon-based drama, 'Cutting It', which ran for four series between 2002 and 2005 (BBC)

“I’ve had some very good parts – parts that depend on the characterisation rather than how the character looks – that give you more longevity as an actress.”

More often than not she plays villainous roles such as the antagonist Queen Pasiphae in the BBC fantasy drama show Atlantis in 2013, Regan Hamleigh, an evil medieval mother in 2010’s The Pillars of the Earth on Channel 4, and as the self-obsessed Melissa who works in fashion in the new modern family sitcom The Cockfields, starting on Gold later this month.

She puts her casting down to having a “look about her that says death”.

“I think on a very superficial level I don’t look like a nice bubbly bundle of fun. I’ve got big cheekbones and dark eyes. I’m not a fluffy bunny.”

She didn’t audition for Bancroft – “it was one of those really lovely times when they came for me”, she recalls. “I remember reading it and thinking this will be so much fun. It was great.”

When she asked the producer why they gave her the role, he told her it was because “the British public like you”. “They thought it would be slightly shocking for an audience to see me pushing people off cliffs in wheelchairs and shooting them.”

Bancroft is on ITV on 1 January