Sheila Hancock is one of the star names in the new Jimmy McGovern drama series Moving On. Emma Pinch reports
ONCE women get past 50, pronounces Sheila Hancock, 76, they seem to just dissolve from view.
Hancock, currently impressing audiences at the London Palladium with her energetic performance as Mother Superior in Sister Act, and shortly to appear in Jimmy McGovern’s new drama series, Moving On, seems set on doing the reverse.
“I have too many faults to be any kind of example to anyone,” she says, enjoying a brief rest in her dressing room between performances. “But I’m doing this show, dancing and singing, and I hope older women in the audience think, good.”
In Moving On, the actress, who lost her husband, John Thaw, to cancer seven years ago, plays Liz, a woman whose dreams of retirement are shattered when her husband dies. Then she meets a man on holiday who helps her come alive again – to the horror of her complacent children.
“It was very nice to have an elderly couple having a romantic relationship, because you generally don’t see that,” she says, explaining why she was attracted to the role. “We should have some more older women in television. But we get rid of them when they're older. We're generally bad with old folk."
But the fact her character is a widow, she states firmly, is where the similarity to herself stops. “I could certainly put myself in that position and imagine what it would be like,” she says, in her well-bred cut glass tones. “I was interested in the family dispute it caused. But I don’t want a romantic relationship. It’s not my situation.”
Damar, her Nepalese suitor in The Rain Has Stopped, by writer Karen Brown, is a retired Gurkha, the plot coinciding with Joanna Lumley’s crusade to have the Government grant the soldiers the right to remain in Britain.
“It was interesting with the Gurkha thing being so current.
“I didn’t see it so much as a Gurkha situation, but as how it is for anybody who comes to this country and is a foreigner and how they are treated by the local community. It seemed to illuminate what it was like to be a person who was not accepted.
“I’m a pacifist. Anything to do with war I’m not too happy with, but it does seem to me to be right that we accept people who fought for our country, then want to stay here.”
