STYLE AND SUBSTANCE

Brenda Blethyn stars as business mogul Emma Harte in a new TV adaptation of Barbara Taylor Bradford's iconic novel

- WORDS: JEN PHARO

When Brenda Blethyn quit playing beloved sleuth DCI Vera Stanhope aged 78, she had dreams of relaxing at home with her husband Michael Mayhew.

Luckily for us, things didn't work out that way and just a year after the last episode of Vera aired, Brenda is back on our TV screens in Channel 4's A Woman Of Substance.

"I hadn't even unpacked my bag, and I was asked to do a film called Dragonfly with Andrea Riseborough. Then it was hot on the heels of that job that I was offered A Woman Of Substance, so all of my plans for relaxing at home went out the window," laughs Brenda. "But I was so pleased to take on a story of this magnitude, and Emma is the same age as me in the story, we were both 79. I was so pleased to try something new because I really hadn't done anything like this before."

Brenda hadn't read A Woman Of Substance or seen the 1980s TV version starring Jenny Seagrove and Deborah Kerr. However, she knew the novel's author Barbara Taylor Bradford had started out in a typing pool like herself and was intrigued.

"I worked for 10 years before I was an actor," says Brenda. "I was in a typing pool in a bank, so I had the same working-class background she did."

A Woman Of Substance begins in the 1900s and tells the story of a Yorkshire maid called Emma Harte who is betrayed by her aristocratic lover and vows revenge. Over her lifetime she dedicates herself to work, and by the 1970s Emma is a powerful business mogul living in New York. But, as her 80th birthday approaches, a new betrayal from within her own family threatens to destroy all she's built.

Brenda plays the older version of Emma, while Jessica Reynolds plays the younger Emma.

Brenda felt she truly understood the character of Emma.