Vicky McClure: Things About The British Actress

Actress Vicky McClure played the villain we all loved to hate in the tense BBC thriller The Replacement. And later, she’s back on screens as DC Kate Fleming in Line of Duty, the police drama starring alongside Thandie Newton.

But how much do you really know about this actress? She’s been in some major TV and film flicks, but she may well have flown slightly under your radar, until now.

Well, she’s 36 and hails from Nottingham. She was spotted by actress Samantha Morton, who helped launch her career, and made her big-screen debut in the 1999 film A Room For Romeo Brass, playing Ladine Brass.

She starred in the Channel Four show This is England for 9 consecutive years, as Frances Lorraine – or ‘Lol’ Jenkins. The programme ran for three seasons, and there was even a film spin-off, which Vicky also starred in. The actress won the BAFTA for Best Actress for her role in the series back in 2011.

She played the roving reporter Karen in the second series of the crime programme. In her own words “She is a determined woman, who really enjoys her job but she is also very human. With the Leveson inquiry going on while we were filming it was quite interesting portraying a reporter on this sort of case. She’s definitely one that needs to get the story out there but she is very aware of how families are affected by the death of a child in the long run and she is cautious with that.”

Madonna once cherry-picked Vicky McClure to take part in her directorial debut, Filth and Wisdom, which came out in 2008. Vicky said, “I was completely gobsmacked when she asked me. She’s a massive Shane Meadows fan.” So how did it come about? “I got this call from Stephen Graham because he’d worked with Guy Ritchie [Madonna’s former husband].

He said ‘Madonna wants to work with you’. I said ‘Yeah, right Steve’. But he rang me that night saying she wanted to meet me and before I knew it, the casting director had sent me a script and said, “This is your daily rate and this is when you start filming.” I was like, “When do I audition?” They said, “No, no, she’s insisted that we get you.”

Like most of us, she is a BIG Greggs fan. In fact, she’s even said that she wouldn’t move to the sunny Californian state of Los Angeles because of the fact that they don’t have the cut-price bakery over there. The actress joked, “It would be very hard for me to move to Hollywood because I’d be nowhere near a Greggs and I don’t think I’d like a life without a sausage roll.”

In an article in other’s magazine in March, she hit out at people who were constantly asking if she wants to have children. She said ‘If this was a bloke, that would never happen. It’s none of your bloody business.

“You know, whether women choose to work when they have children, whether they choose not to, whether they do a bit of both, it’s nobody’s business.”