“There is always something good around the corner”
IT IS April 1989, just days after the Hillsborough disaster in which 97 fans attending an FA Cup semi-final between Liverpool and Nottingham Forest lost their lives. Sue Johnston, a lifelong Liverpool supporter, along with other members of the cast of Brookside, the Channel 4 soap set and based in the city, are visiting Liverpool’s ground, Anfield, to pay their respects.
As they are leaving, a steward asks if they would mind talking to some relatives of people who had been killed in the tragedy. Sue was introduced to a mother whose son had died and was, as Sue put it, “desolate with grief”. “You know how it is Sheila, you’ve lost a son,” she says, referring to Sue’s Brookside character, Sheila Grant, whose son is murdered in the series.
Rather than point out that her character wasn’t real, and that her own son was very much alive, Sue took the woman’s hand, “and just sat with her letting her say what she needed to say.”
It was a reminder of how much the simple business of acting can touch people’s lives in extraordinary ways, and Sue has managed to do this not once but twice, with Sheila and then as Barbara in the brilliant, groundbreaking Royle Family.
Being recognised has had its downsides – Sue’s son Joel found it especially difficult when she was at the height of her fame and was recognised everywhere she went. The upside was being able to take her father, another lifelong Liverpool fan, to
