Kathy Burke\u2019s mother, Bridget, died of stomach cancer when she was 18 months old; she writes that it made her \u201cfeel dead famous\u201d in her community. She was raised by her older brothers, John and\u00a0Barry, who were 10 and eight when it happened, and sometimes by\u00a0their father Pat, an alcoholic for many years, violent with it, who struggled to care for his family. Pat and Bridget had moved to London from Ireland, and\u00a0the Burkes lived on an estate in Islington, where the other families played a vital role in raising and feeding the children. On his deathbed, in 1994, Pat asked Kathy to\u00a0do two things: to give up smoking, and to write more. It\u00a0has only taken her\u00a030 years, she says, but she\u2019s finally\u00a0done the latter.<\/p>\n
The entertainment industry is top-heavy with people from middle-and upper-class backgrounds who have a limited understanding of lives that don\u2019t resemble their own. In my experience, one of the misconceptions they have about working-class life\u00a0is\u00a0that it is all grey skies and kitchen\u2011sink\u00a0misery. Burke\u2019s memoir has its\u00a0painful moments, but the joy\u00a0radiating from it is palpable and\u00a0invigorating.<\/p>\n
As a small child, she remembers hanging around the ice-cream van (\u201cthe usual queue of kids forming a multicoloured snake\u201d, she writes, deliciously) near her block of flats. A stranger appears, announces she\u2019s won on the bingo, and offers to buy them ice-creams. \u201cOoh, ain\u2019t you ugly,\u201d she says to Burke, with breathtaking cruelty. Crushed, she turns her mortification into humour. \u201cI\u2019m the best dancer at the ugly bug ball, though,\u201d she quips, and does a jig to make everyone laugh.<\/p>\n
Her teenage years in the 70s and 80s involve pinballing around London, giddy on punk and possibility<\/p>\n
The anecdote is telling, and soothing hurt with humour becomes a theme. Burke is sometimes evasive about deeper wounds, alluding to a bad love affair but keeping it out of focus. Stories of kindness come more easily, and as a child, she encounters a lot of it. Her teenage years in the 70s and 80s involve pinballing around London, giddy on punk and possibility. She bumps into Johnny Rotten, panics about what to say to him and then, perfectly, simply shouts at him to \u201cfuck off\u201d. She runs into the Clash, and\u00a0almost becomes a roadie for them\u00a0before deciding to take up a place\u00a0at the legendary Anna Scher theatre school instead. That decision leads to a\u00a0long career as an actor, writer and director.<\/p>\n
Burke is probably best known for her funny roles. Her early days of live comedy sound anarchic and gleeful. On stage with the musical duo Raw Sex\u00a0at Chelsea barracks, their raucous performance earns heckles and jeers. She responds by shouting \u201cGive Ireland back to the Irish!\u201d before they all beat a hasty retreat. During the 1990s, she appears in Absolutely Fabulous and then becomes extremely famous co-starring in Harry Enfield\u2019s sketch shows. Their teenage boy characters, Kevin and Perry (she was Perry, naming him after a friend), even get their own film.<\/p>\n
But she offers plenty of reminders that she has also been a serious actor, albeit rarely taken as seriously as she\u00a0deserved. In 1997, she won the best\u00a0actress award at Cannes for an extraordinary performance in her old\u00a0mate Gary Oldman\u2019s film Nil By\u00a0Mouth. Elsewhere, however, a producer expresses his amazement that she is capable of doing an accent other than her own. There is short shrift for Danny Boyle, with whom she\u00a0worked on a TV miniseries called Mr\u00a0Wroe\u2019s Virgins; she likens him to\u00a0\u201ca\u00a0supercilious priest from my childhood\u201d. (He fares better than her co-star Kerry Fox, whom she calls \u201ca charmless prick\u201d.) In the film Elizabeth, she is a sickly and memorable Mary Tudor. Its director, Shekhar Kapur, suggests that Burke might need extra help, as she is not the type who would usually play a queen. \u201cI didn\u2019t know when we met that you were working class,\u201d he tells her. Burke remembers all of this with a shrug of frustration, but pay attention and you can discern fury bubbling up from the page.<\/p>\n
Autobiographies are rarely as blunt\u00a0as they could be, for a variety of\u00a0reasons. If this represents the toned-down version of Burke\u2019s life, then I can\u00a0only imagine what it would be like\u00a0to hear her tell it at full throttle. A\u00a0Mind of My Own ends abruptly, when she decides she wants to stop acting to focus on directing theatre, announcing her retirement on SMTV Live, the Saturday morning kids\u2019 show\u00a0hosted by Ant and Dec. I hope she writes about what came next, because whether she\u2019s in the spotlight\u00a0or not, her stories are vivid,\u00a0bright and beautiful.<\/p>\n
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