Actress Kathy Burke (French And Saunders, Harry Enfield And Chums) has declared that she is proud of herself for saying no to a director who requested she act out an intimate scene in a play when she was 18.
"Growing up in the 70s, if you were a girl or woman, a man could tell you what to do, " Burke declared in an interview with The Observer. "If you were sitting on the bus: ‘Get up,’ ‘Move,’ whatever. You did what you were told."
The 53-year-old actress insisted that she had `some backbone' and realised that " 'no, I don’t need to be spoken to like this.' "
Burke was cast in a play as a mentally-ill patient in a psychiatric hospital who was being abused by a porter, and she said she resisted when the director asked her to feign self-arousal. "I was only 18. And I’m so proud when I look back because I just said no: ‘No it’s not in the script so, no, I’m not going to do it.’"
"The thing with me is that I’m quite arrogant, " the actress said. "I’ve got faith in my own talent and I always have. And if anyone turned around and said to me: ‘You’re never going to work again,’ I used to say ‘I will.’"
She was asked if she had been sexually harassed in her 30-year-plus career. "I was never the sort of girl that those sorts of men were interested in," she replied. "I’m not conventionally pretty and I’m also quite coarse and I’ve also got a very big mouth, and if anyone had tried that with me I would have probably head-butted them and reported them to the police."
The actress declared that she looks in the mirror and thinks "I’m gorgeous".
Burke is directing Sam Bain’s work for stage, The Retreat, which opens at London’s Park Theatre next month.
