Sue Jenkins
Encyclopedia
Susan Elizabeth Jenkins (born 31 July 1958, Liverpool
) is an English actress and one of two daughters of Albert and Marjorie Jenkins.
to Shakespeare. Alan Bleasdale
wrote the lead female role in Having a Ball for Jenkins, which she played at the Theatre Royal, York.
She then started to work more on television including How We Used To Live
and the cult TV programme, The Beiderbecke Affair
. She first came to prominence in 1985 when she joined the cast of top rated British soap opera
, Coronation Street
, playing barmaid Gloria Todd in 238 episodes. She left the show in 1988 after becoming pregnant with her second child, Richard, who played Craig Harris in the soap from 2002 until 2006. She returned to television in the series Coasting with Peter Howitt
and in 1990 playing the part of the much loved Jackie Corkhill
in the Liverpool
based, and often controversial, Channel 4
soap opera
Brookside
.
Since leaving Brookside, Jenkins has continued to work steadily, making guest appearances on British television, including In Deep, Holby City
Merseybeat
, Dalziel & Pascoe
, Midsomer Murders
and Heartbeat. Jenkins also presented Loose Women
in 2006. Jenkins has thoroughly enjoyed her return to theatre. Last year, she appeared in the film, Blue Collars and Buttercups and is regularly heard on BBC Radio 4
afternoon dramas. She has recorded over 100 radio plays and radio adaptations of classic serials over the years, including Middlemarch
, Villette
and Wuthering Heights
with Derek Jacobi
.
As a director, Jenkins wrote, produced and directed Night of Stars 1 and 2 at the Palace Theatre, Manchester
, raising over 70,000 pounds to build an orphanage in Thailand
for orphaned children of the Tsunami
and to help children's charities in the UK.
She has also directed Aladdin
at the Tameside Hippodrome Theatre in 2006 , produced her son, Richard Fleeshman's first concert in 2006 at the same theatre and produced and directed yet another musical extravaganza Gala Night Of Stars there in March.
Sue made her debut in Emmerdale
on 25 August 2008 as Bonnie Drinkwater, an ironic name for the character as Bonnie was often found passed out from too much alcohol. Her most recent television appearances were a second guest lead in Heartbeat and as a celebrity guest on The Alan Titchmarsh Show
. She is currently working on Casualty
. Sue was voted 'Woman of the Year' in 2008 and was honoured by This Is Your Life
in 2001. Sue has recently appeared in Eve Enslers The Vagina Monologues
at the Empire Theatre in Liverpool. Sue has recently recorded an episode of 'Doctors' starring opposite her own daughter, Emily Fleeshman.
Sue starred in the National three month tour of 'The Vagina Monologues' in September 2010 playing in 65 theatres.
She has been recently working on a pilot for a new Comedy series.
Sue is married to the actor David Fleeshman in 1978 and they now have three children - Emily, Richard
and Rosie.
Liverpool
Liverpool is a city and metropolitan borough of Merseyside, England, along the eastern side of the Mersey Estuary. It was founded as a borough in 1207 and was granted city status in 1880...
) is an English actress and one of two daughters of Albert and Marjorie Jenkins.
Biography
Sue Jenkins became an actress at the age of eighteen having studied at drama college. She worked in repertory theatres across the UK for the first 11 years of her career, performing in over a hundred plays, playing everything from Alan AyckbournAlan Ayckbourn
Sir Alan Ayckbourn CBE is a prolific English playwright. He has written and produced seventy-three full-length plays in Scarborough and London and was, between 1972 and 2009, the artistic director of the Stephen Joseph Theatre in Scarborough, where all but four of his plays have received their...
to Shakespeare. Alan Bleasdale
Alan Bleasdale
Alan Bleasdale is an English television dramatist, best known for writing several social realist drama serials based on the lives of ordinary people.The Bleasdales live in prescot,liverpool,wales and london.-Early life:Bleasdale is an only child; his father worked in a food factory and his mother...
wrote the lead female role in Having a Ball for Jenkins, which she played at the Theatre Royal, York.
She then started to work more on television including How We Used To Live
How We Used To Live
How We Used to Live is a British educational historical television drama written by Freda Kelsall and sometimes narrated by Redvers Kyle and John Crosse, both employed as continuity announcers at Yorkshire Television at the time of production. Production began in 1968 at the YTV studios in Leeds...
and the cult TV programme, The Beiderbecke Affair
The Beiderbecke Affair
The Beiderbecke Affair is a television series produced in the UK by ITV during 1985, written by the prolific Alan Plater, whose lengthy credits to British Television since the 1960s included the preceding 4 part mini series Get Lost! for ITV in 1981...
. She first came to prominence in 1985 when she joined the cast of top rated British soap opera
Soap opera
A soap opera, sometimes called "soap" for short, is an ongoing, episodic work of dramatic fiction presented in serial format on radio or as television programming. The name soap opera stems from the original dramatic serials broadcast on radio that had soap manufacturers, such as Procter & Gamble,...
, Coronation Street
Coronation Street
Coronation Street is a British soap opera set in Weatherfield, a fictional town in Greater Manchester based on Salford. Created by Tony Warren, Coronation Street was first broadcast on 9 December 1960...
, playing barmaid Gloria Todd in 238 episodes. She left the show in 1988 after becoming pregnant with her second child, Richard, who played Craig Harris in the soap from 2002 until 2006. She returned to television in the series Coasting with Peter Howitt
Peter Howitt
Peter Howitt is an English actor and film director. He grew up in Eltham, London and Bromley, Kent, Peter used to be a part of the Priory Players in the Priory behind Christ Church, Eltham. He studied at the Drama Studio London. He has two children, Luke and Amy...
and in 1990 playing the part of the much loved Jackie Corkhill
Jackie Corkhill
Jackie Corkhill is a character in Channel 4 soap Brookside played by Sue Jenkins from 1991 to 2001.-Introduction:Jackie was introduced as the long-suffering estranged wife of Jimmy Corkhill in 1991...
in the Liverpool
Liverpool
Liverpool is a city and metropolitan borough of Merseyside, England, along the eastern side of the Mersey Estuary. It was founded as a borough in 1207 and was granted city status in 1880...
based, and often controversial, Channel 4
Channel 4
Channel 4 is a British public-service television broadcaster which began working on 2 November 1982. Although largely commercially self-funded, it is ultimately publicly owned; originally a subsidiary of the Independent Broadcasting Authority , the station is now owned and operated by the Channel...
soap opera
Soap opera
A soap opera, sometimes called "soap" for short, is an ongoing, episodic work of dramatic fiction presented in serial format on radio or as television programming. The name soap opera stems from the original dramatic serials broadcast on radio that had soap manufacturers, such as Procter & Gamble,...
Brookside
Brookside
Brookside is a defunct British soap opera set in Liverpool, England. The series began on the launch night of Channel 4 on 2 November 1982, and ran for 21 years until 4 November 2003...
.
Since leaving Brookside, Jenkins has continued to work steadily, making guest appearances on British television, including In Deep, Holby City
Holby City
Holby City, stylised as Holby Ci+y, is a British medical drama television series that airs weekly on BBC One.The series was created by Tony McHale and Mal Young as a spin-off from the established BBC medical drama Casualty, and premiered on 12 January 1999...
Merseybeat
Merseybeat (TV series)
Merseybeat is a British police procedural television series shown on BBC One, with a total of four series broadcast between 2001 and 2004. The series follows the personal and professional lives of one shift of police officers from the fictional Newton Park police station on Merseyside, England.In...
, Dalziel & Pascoe
Dalziel and Pascoe (BBC TV series)
Dalziel and Pascoe is a popular British television crime drama based on the Dalziel and Pascoe books by Reginald Hill, which was first broadcast in March 1996. It is set in Yorkshire, and is about two detectives...
, Midsomer Murders
Midsomer Murders
Midsomer Murders is a British television detective drama that has aired on ITV since 1997. The show is based on the books by Caroline Graham, as originally adapted by Anthony Horowitz. The lead character is DCI Tom Barnaby who works for Causton CID. When Nettles left the show in 2011 he was...
and Heartbeat. Jenkins also presented Loose Women
Loose Women
Loose Women is a British lunchtime television programme, first broadcast in 1999 on ITV. It consists of a panel of four women who interview celebrities and discuss topical issues, ranging from daily politics and current affairs, to celebrity gossip...
in 2006. Jenkins has thoroughly enjoyed her return to theatre. Last year, she appeared in the film, Blue Collars and Buttercups and is regularly heard on BBC Radio 4
BBC Radio 4
BBC Radio 4 is a British domestic radio station, operated and owned by the BBC, that broadcasts a wide variety of spoken-word programmes, including news, drama, comedy, science and history. It replaced the BBC Home Service in 1967. The station controller is currently Gwyneth Williams, and the...
afternoon dramas. She has recorded over 100 radio plays and radio adaptations of classic serials over the years, including Middlemarch
Middlemarch
Middlemarch: A Study of Provincial Life is a novel by George Eliot, the pen name of Mary Anne Evans, later Marian Evans. It is her seventh novel, begun in 1869 and then put aside during the final illness of Thornton Lewes, the son of her companion George Henry Lewes...
, Villette
Villette (novel)
Villette is a novel by Charlotte Brontë, published in 1853. After an unspecified family disaster, protagonist Lucy Snowe travels to the fictional city of Villette to teach at an all-girls school where she is unwillingly pulled into both adventure and romance...
and Wuthering Heights
Wuthering Heights
Wuthering Heights is a novel by Emily Brontë published in 1847. It was her only novel and written between December 1845 and July 1846. It remained unpublished until July 1847 and was not printed until December after the success of her sister Charlotte Brontë's novel Jane Eyre...
with Derek Jacobi
Derek Jacobi
Sir Derek George Jacobi, CBE is an English actor and film director.A "forceful, commanding stage presence", Jacobi has enjoyed a highly successful stage career, appearing in such stage productions as Hamlet, Uncle Vanya, and Oedipus the King. He received a Tony Award for his performance in...
.
As a director, Jenkins wrote, produced and directed Night of Stars 1 and 2 at the Palace Theatre, Manchester
Palace Theatre, Manchester
The Palace Theatre, Manchester, is one of the main theatres in Manchester, England. It is situated on Oxford Street, on the north-east corner of the intersection with Whitworth Street. The Palace and its 'sister' theatre the Manchester Opera House on Quay Street are operated by the same parent...
, raising over 70,000 pounds to build an orphanage in Thailand
Thailand
Thailand , officially the Kingdom of Thailand , formerly known as Siam , is a country located at the centre of the Indochina peninsula and Southeast Asia. It is bordered to the north by Burma and Laos, to the east by Laos and Cambodia, to the south by the Gulf of Thailand and Malaysia, and to the...
for orphaned children of the Tsunami
Tsunami
A tsunami is a series of water waves caused by the displacement of a large volume of a body of water, typically an ocean or a large lake...
and to help children's charities in the UK.
She has also directed Aladdin
Aladdin
Aladdin is a Middle Eastern folk tale. It is one of the tales in The Book of One Thousand and One Nights , and one of the most famous, although it was actually added to the collection by Antoine Galland ....
at the Tameside Hippodrome Theatre in 2006 , produced her son, Richard Fleeshman's first concert in 2006 at the same theatre and produced and directed yet another musical extravaganza Gala Night Of Stars there in March.
Sue made her debut in Emmerdale
Emmerdale
Emmerdale, is a long-running British soap opera set in Emmerdale , a fictional village in the Yorkshire Dales. Created by Kevin Laffan, Emmerdale was first broadcast on 16 October 1972...
on 25 August 2008 as Bonnie Drinkwater, an ironic name for the character as Bonnie was often found passed out from too much alcohol. Her most recent television appearances were a second guest lead in Heartbeat and as a celebrity guest on The Alan Titchmarsh Show
The Alan Titchmarsh Show
The Alan Titchmarsh Show is a British daytime TV chat show broadcast between 3 and 4pm weekdays on the ITV Network.-Format:The programme made its debut on ITV in 2007. It focused on the theme of "The Best of British" focusing on food, entertainment and celebrities in a mid-afternoon slot...
. She is currently working on Casualty
Casualty (TV series)
Casualty, stylised as Casual+y, is a British weekly television show broadcast on BBC One, and the longest-running emergency medical drama television series in the world. Created by Jeremy Brock and Paul Unwin, it was first broadcast on 6 September 1986, and transmitted in the UK on BBC One. The...
. Sue was voted 'Woman of the Year' in 2008 and was honoured by This Is Your Life
This Is Your Life
This Is Your Life is an American television documentary series broadcast on NBC, originally hosted by its producer, Ralph Edwards from 1952 to 1961. In the show, the host surprises a guest, and proceeds to take them through their life in front of an audience including friends and family.Edwards...
in 2001. Sue has recently appeared in Eve Enslers The Vagina Monologues
The Vagina Monologues
The Vagina Monologues is an episodic play written by Eve Ensler which ran at the Off Broadway Westside Theatre after a limited run at AFRICA in 1996. Ensler originally starred in the production which was produced by David Stone, Nina Essman, Dan Markley, The Araca Group, Willa Shalit, Mike Skipper...
at the Empire Theatre in Liverpool. Sue has recently recorded an episode of 'Doctors' starring opposite her own daughter, Emily Fleeshman.
Sue starred in the National three month tour of 'The Vagina Monologues' in September 2010 playing in 65 theatres.
She has been recently working on a pilot for a new Comedy series.
Sue is married to the actor David Fleeshman in 1978 and they now have three children - Emily, Richard
Richard Fleeshman
Richard Jonathan Fleeshman is an English actor and singer-songwriter. His television career began as a twelve year old, playing Craig Harris for four years in Coronation Street and most recently "All The Small Things"...
and Rosie.