Dad Thought Acting Was A Ridiculous Thing To Do

Luckily for us ,Nicola Walker's mum persua ded her otherwise and the actress has never looked back.

- Gerry Gilbert

Nicola Walker would perhaps be the first person to admit that she isn’t exactly a household name – she might even agree with one newspaper’s description of her as ‘the TV superstar you have probably never heard of ’.And yet most of us do know her. She stars in BBC One’s Last Tango In Halifax as Gillian, the feisty Yorkshire sheep farmer coming to terms with the fact that her widowed father (played by Sir Derek Jacobi) is getting remarried in his seventies. And Nicola is currently on our screens in ITV’s Unforgotten, playing DCI Cassie Stuart, the ‘cold case’ cop investigating decades-old unsolved murders.

This isn’t the first TV detective portrayed by the 46-year-old actress – she starred as DI Susan Taylor opposite Robson Green in the 1990s thriller series Touching Evil, before going on to play MI5 secret agent Ruth Evershed for eight years in the spy drama Spooks.

Born in the East End of London to a scrap-metal dealer father ‘who thought acting was a ridiculous thing to do’, it was Nicola’s mum who encouraged her to follow her dream. Mind you, Nicola admits, when she first went to acting classes at the age of 12, it wasn’t all about her ‘art’ – she also did it ‘in order to speak to boys’.

She proved a natural talent,but she also won a place to study English at the University of Cambridge, making lifelong friends there with Great British Bake Off presenter Sue Perkins.

Nicola now lives in the Essex countryside with her husband, actor Barnaby Kay, and their son Harry, 10. Her role in