Joanna Scanlan

Private Passions

Joanna Scanlan is one of our great comic actors; she’s best-known for “The Thick of It”, where she plays the obstructive civil servant Terri Coverley. But her range is much wider than comedy. She’s extraordinarily moving in “After Love”, Aleem Khan’s 2021 film about a widow who discovers her husband’s secret life – a performance so powerful that it dominates the whole film, and won her BAFTA’s lead actress award in 2022.

Before that, she played Charles Dickens's long-suffering wife, Catherine, in “The Invisible Woman” – and appeared in “Girl with a Pearl Earring” and “Notes on a Scandal”, to name just a couple of her film roles. On television she’s familiar from “The Larkins”, “No Offence” and “Puppy Love” – a series she co-wrote. She also co-wrote “Getting On”, a blackly comic portrayal of life on an NHS ward, which has become a great deal more topical in the fourteen years since it was first broadcast.

Born in Merseyside, Joanna Scanlan grew up in North Wales; she went to Cambridge to study history and law, and only got her first job as an actress when she was thirty-four, after having a breakdown.

She tells Michael about how that breakdown became a turning point, thanks to a doctor who told her that she would be ill all her life unless she acted. She remembers her schooldays in Wales, when she sang in a choir five times a day, and her early career working for the Arts Council, where the power-mad clock-watchers she worked with became the inspiration for the character of Terri Coverley.

A Loftus Media production for BBC Radio 3 Produced by Elizabeth Burke