- Born
- Birth nameJulie Claire Hesmondhalgh
- Height5′ 3¾″ (1.62 m)
- Julie Claire Hesmondhalgh was born in Accrington, Lancashire, where she was involved in local amateur theatre and studied A-level Theatre Studies at Accrington and Rossendale College under Martin Cosgrif. Despite planning to go into social work, she won a grant to attend LAMDA, where she studied from 1988-91. After graduating she was part of the theatre company, Arts Threshold, and with her teacher and mentor Brian Astbury and a group of friends, built a theatre in a basement in Paddington.
This led to roles on television in, among other programs, The Bill (1984), The Dwelling Place (1994), Pat and Margaret (1994), and an episode of Dalziel and Pascoe (1996). She was spotted by the casting crew for Coronation Street (1960) while appearing in "Much Ado About Nothing" in the Royal Exchange theatre in Manchester. She played "Hayley" in Coronation Street (1960), the first trans-character in a UK soap, from 1998 to 2014, when she left, winning a National TV Award for her performance in her exit storyline, which she shared with her screen husband, David Neilson. The couple also won Best Actor and Actress at the Soap Awards that year, as well as Best Onscreen Partnership.
She returned to work extensively in theatre, radio and television, with roles in Russell T. Davies's Cucumber (2015), Happy Valley (2014) (series 2), Doctor Who (2005), Catastrophe (2015), Inside No. 9 (2014), The Trouble with Maggie Cole (2020), and The A Word (2016) (series 3). The BBC4 film, Black Roses: The Killing of Sophie Lancaster (2015), in which she reprised her stage role as the mother of a murdered teenager, won her a Best Performance in a Single Drama Award from the Royal Television Society. Her role as a rape survivor in series 3 of Broadchurch (2013) earned her a BAFTA nomination for Best Supporting Actress in 2018.
Hesmondhalgh lives in Manchester with her family and is a founding member of political theatre collective, Take Back. In 2019, her book, Working Diary, was published by Methuen.- IMDb Mini Biography By: Julie Hesmondhalgh
- SpouseIan Kershaw(June 2003 - present) (2 children)
- Julie's surname is pronounced "Hesmondhalsh", with the stress on the first and third syllables.
- Is one of five Coronation Street (1960) actresses to have won a Best Actress Award at the British Soap Awards; the others are Suranne Jones, Kate Ford, Katherine Kelly, and Alison King.
- Mother, with husband Ian Kershaw, of daughters Martha Mo Kershaw (b. October 2001), and Lyss Keshaw (b. 2004).
- The LGBT world is one that I'm familiar and comfortable with.
- [on Cucumber (2015)] It's just a drama about a group of people having sex with each other. I don't find it risqué. Just because it's about gay sex, it doesn't mean that it's dirty or controversial.
- I don't think there's as much of a divide between types of acting as there used to be. If someone has been in a good soap opera and they've had a big storyline, TV channels are pretty savvy that they can attract people to watch other things they're in.
- I just caught up with Marvellous (2014) with Toby Jones, which I loved. And I thought The Lost Honour of Christopher Jefferies (2014) was brilliant.
- I've always thought that: that telly and theatre and art is such a brilliant way to like break down those boundaries and fight prejudice.
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