Sarah Lancashire kept walking away from safe TV. Now Netflix builds dramas around her

Sarah Lancashire

Photo via The Movie Database (TMDB)

Born	October 10, 1964 Urmston, Lancashire, England
Occupation	Actress
Known for	Yesterday, Everybody's Talking About Jamie, And When Did You Last See Your Father?
Awards	3 British Academy Television · National Television · RTS Programme · Golden Nymph, Best Performance by an Actress in a Mini-Series

Sarah Lancashire’s career is easiest to read through the doors she closed behind her. She left Raquel Wolstenhulme, the Coronation Street character millions of viewers had taken to heart, while Raquel was still pulling in huge audiences. A few years later she signed the most lucrative exclusive contract ITV had ever handed an actress, then let it lapse. Neither move looked sensible from the outside. Both cleared space for the women she plays now: Catherine Cawood, the West Yorkshire police sergeant of Happy Valley, and Reed, the handler who runs Keira Knightley‘s spy in Netflix‘s Black Doves. Reed is about to come back, and Netflix has just announced a second drama built entirely around Lancashire.

Television was in the house before it was in her plans. Her records name another town as her birthplace, but the place that formed her is Oldham, where the family settled when she was a toddler and where her father, Geoffrey Lancashire, had grown up before writing for Coronation Street. She has said fame never appealed to her, and acting barely crossed her mind until she was leaving school. Clinical depression arrived in her late teens, and she kept it private for a long time.

The Guildhall School of Music and Drama settled the matter. She graduated in 1986, at 21, having been born in Urmston on 10 October 1964. The start was slow. Repertory companies turned her down until the Manchester Library Theatre gave her an Equity card, and for five years she paid the bills teaching drama at Salford University. The break came in 1990, as Linda in Willy Russell’s Blood Brothers in the West End. Two weeks after it ended she auditioned for her father’s old soap.

Raquel arrived in January 1991 on a three-month contract and stayed, with one interruption, until 1996. On the page the character had an acid streak; Lancashire played against the writing, made her funny and let the audience feel for her. Twenty million people watched her final scenes. The fame she disliked, ducking magazine interviews and personal appearances. Much later she revealed that two years into the role she had gone through a breakdown lasting 14 months and told almost no one, a choice she called “the worst thing I could have done”.

The habit of leaving started there. As district nurse Ruth Goddard in ITV’s Where the Heart Is she was in one of Britain’s most-watched dramas, and she turned down a pay rise to quit because the part had become “too chocolate-boxy, no longer a challenge”. At the BBC she played a widowed factory worker in Paul Abbott’s Clocking Off, drawing on her own years as a single mother.

Then came the contract that frames the oddest stretch of her working life. In July 2000 ITV signed her to a two-year exclusive deal reportedly worth £1.3 million, making her the best-paid actress in British television. The network’s drama controller, Nick Elliott, admitted that interest from the BBC had been a factor; part of what the money bought was her absence from a rival channel. What it bought on screen was uneven. The Cry, a psychological thriller in which she drew on her own depression, won her a Golden Nymph at the Monte Carlo Television Festival, while most of the rest has faded. By the summer of 2002 she had stepped away from the arrangement, reportedly to cut her workload. The usual telling of her story calls what came later a late flowering. That version flatters the industry. The actress had not changed. What changed was that writers stopped treating her as a ratings asset to be locked up and began writing for her.

The writer who changed the terms was Sally Wainwright. In Last Tango in Halifax, from 2012, Lancashire played Caroline, an Oxford-educated headmistress who falls in love with a fellow teacher. The part brought her more letters than anything she had done, many from women who said it had helped them come out, and the BAFTA for supporting actress in 2014. She calls Caroline the role she is proudest of. Wainwright, “blown away” by those performances, wrote her the next one. In Happy Valley, Catherine Cawood is a sergeant in the Calder Valley raising the grandson born of her daughter’s rape, years after the daughter took her own life. Mark Lawson wrote in The Guardian that Lancashire caught “the script’s demandingly contradictory notes of tragedy, comedy, love, guilt, weakness and courage”. When the second series drew criticism for its violence against women, she defended it as an “absolutely honest portrayal of what a female police officer can be subjected to”. The three series, the last broadcast in 2023, brought her the BAFTA for best actress in 2017 and again in 2024.

Around Cawood she built a run of precise work. In the BBC’s 2015 film of The Dresser she played Madge, the stage manager quietly in love with Anthony Hopkins‘s actor-manager, opposite Ian McKellen. Jack Thorne cast her as a social worker under public scrutiny in Kiri. For HBO Max she became Julia Child in Julia, opposite David Hyde Pierce: an actress raised in Oldham carrying the most American of television cooks. Critics liked it; Max cancelled it after the second season ended in December 2023, during a round of cost-cutting. She was made an OBE in 2017 and a CBE in the 2025 New Year Honours. Since 2001 she has been married to the television executive Peter Salmon; she has three sons.

Her current home is Netflix. In Black Doves, Joe Barton’s spy thriller that premiered in December 2024, she plays Reed, the handler of Keira Knightley’s Helen Webb, with Ben Whishaw as Helen’s friend Sam. The second season arrives on 5 November 2026, with Reed caught in a plot to undermine her position inside the organisation. On 24 September, at its first UK upfront presentation, Netflix announced Witch Hunt, a six-part drama created and written by Abi Morgan. Lancashire plays August Howell, a descendant of the so-called Witch of Cambridge, freed after three decades in prison for drowning her three young daughters and returning to a university town that wants her gone. “I last worked with Sarah Lancashire over 25 years ago,” Morgan said. “I have been chasing the perfect role for her ever since. This is it.” Netflix currently lists the series for 2028.

Reed comes first, in November. August Howell belongs to a line Lancashire knows well: a woman the town has already judged, carrying something nobody else wants to look at directly. She has spent four decades choosing those women over easier money, and now a streamer is commissioning them with her name attached from the first page.

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Tags: actors, actresses, Keira Knightley, Black Doves, Happy Valley, Julia

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