Hampstead Express, UK
Dec 10 2004

East End girl
editorial@islingtonexpress.co.uk

JUST in case any hardened journalists get too emotional after the
advance screening of Michelle Collins’ new drama, Can’t Buy Me Love,
the ITV press office has kindly left a box of tissues for us to wipe
our eyes.

The programme does have a feel-good factor and it’s likely some
viewers will emerge misty-eyed after 90 minutes. Collins is
convincing as Donna, the long-suffering wife who throws out her
decorator husband Alan (Martin Kemp) after having enough of his lies
and financial ineptitude.

She’s left penniless as the family find themselves in a no-win
situation when the bailiffs come knocking on the door. She is then
tricked into taking Alan back after he tells her he’s won £9million
pounds on the lottery. She swaps their council flat and threadbare
existence for a house in the country and a life she and her daughter
could only dream about. But it’s another of his lies and she has been
duped.

It’s a romantic drama with comic overtones, especially when the
friends and relatives the family never knew they had queue up asking
for money.

The drama was inspired by a newspaper article about a northern
decorator who in real life served time in prison for the crime. Also
it’s topical, considering the lottery has just celebrated its tenth
anniversary.

Collins, 41, arrives for our meeting in the ITV Centre on The
Southbank wearing a long black leather coat, black boots and a stripy
red and blue dress. Considering she’s just flown in from New York a
day after being presented with an Emmy award for Channel 4’s
children’s programme The Illustrated Mum, she looks relaxed and
laid-back.

Although she and co-star Kemp were both in EastEnders, they missed
each other by a few months. She left in 1998 after playing Cindy for
11 years and he joined the cast at the end of that year.

“I’ve never worked with Martin before but we knew each other
socially,” she says. “When I read the script and saw Martin had the
role as my husband I thought, ‘Oh, EastEnders; it will be fine.’ And
Martin was perfect. We didn’t talk about EastEnders – it was an
unspoken thing.”

Someone she did know and who was pivotal to her accepting the part
was Can’t Buy Me Love writer Tony Jordan. She knew him as the writer
of some of her most dramatic scenes in EastEnders.

She says: “Most of my big stuff as Cindy was written for me by either
Tony Jordan or Tony McHale. When I saw it was one of Tony Jordan’s
scripts I knew it would be good. I was in EastEnders for a long time
and, although he wasn’t always around, they’d always call him in if I
was about to have a big storyline.

“Before I accept a part I always look at who the writer is.”

Collins describes Donna as “a resilient, dignified and ordinary woman
who loves her husband and daughter”. Collins has a slight connection
with the lottery in that she used to promote it with Neil Morrissey
and release the lottery balls on the Saturday night BBC show.

“It’s about the lottery but it’s also a good, old-fashioned charming
love story, so that’s what came across to me when I read it,” she
says. “They’ve been together so long that they’re intertwined. I
don’t think they could imagine life without each other, and Donna –
who is less flawed than most characters I play – relies on Alan for
so much that they couldn’t be apart for that long anyway.”

Collins admits she and Donna are totally different: “I’ve seen the
side of life that Donna’s never had, but I don’t mean that in a
patronising sort of way,” she says. “I’m much more independent and I
have a career.”

Since leaving Albert Square six years ago, Collins has remained a
staple of the television schedules. Whether as the soccer player’s
wife who turns to crime in Daylight Robbery, the serial bigamist in
Perfect or the mother battling to keep her daughter in Ella and the
Mothers. With another of her BBC series, 2,000 Acres of Sky playing
on NBC, Collins has an open mind about working in America.

She says: “They do have great television over there and if I could
get some work in America that would be fantastic, but at the same
time I would still like to do good work over here. There are a lot of
British actors out there and some do well while others don’t.

“It’s very early days so we’ll have to wait and see.”

She stresses there are no plans to move to America – and adds how
much she loves Britain, in particular Muswell Hill where she lives
with Maia, her eight-year-old daughter, who can chalk up Can’t Buy Me
Love as yet another TV appearance with her mother.

Collins is fond of the area because “it’s very family orientated”.
She likes the shops like the Giraffe Café in The Broadway and Banners
in Crouch End.

She says: “Even when I lived in Islington, I always loved Muswell
Hill; it’s so nice and relaxed. You can be very anonymous there and
it’s a popular place for actors to live. You just run into them in
the street, like I bumped into Mackenzie Crook and his baby the other
day.”

She was born in Hackney and after youth theatre at 14 studied drama
at Kingsway Princeton College. Her early years in the business
involved appearing with the band Squeeze in their video of Up the
Junction. Later she toured as a backing singer for Mari Wilson and
the Wilsations who accompanied groups such as Level 42, Marc Almond
and Altered Images.

Her debut on television was in 1984 with Gary Oldman in the powerful
BBC drama Morgan’s Boy about a troubled young boy who goes to live
with his uncle in Wales. Bergerac, two series of the BBC comedy
Running Wild and then roles in films including Personal Services,
starring Julie Walters, and Hidden City, directed by Stephen
Poliakoff, followed.

The year that spun her professional life around was in 1988 when
EastEnders executive producer Julia Smith asked to play a new
character called Cindy Beale. The booking was only for a handful of
episodes, which turned into 11 years of her acting life.

Of the programme’s current problems she says: “I think EastEnders
will bounce back because all soaps have blips. It’s so typical of
this country that we love things when they’re successful and when
they’re not we go in there dismissing them.”

After EastEnders there was more television work and this year she
co-starred with Ballykissangel actor Stephen Tomkinson in the West
End play Rattle of a Simple Man, playing a prostitute with a hidden
past who strikes up a friendship with a client.

Although Collins can’t confirm what we’ll see her in next, she is
hoping to return to Armenia where she’s visited before as an Oxfam
ambassador.

“I went to Armenia this year just before I did Can’t Buy Me Love and
it’s possible I’ll do some more work for them early next year,” she
says. “I’d like to go back to Armenia because I want to find out how
those projects I saw, to do with education and health, are
progressing. I’ve been an ambassador for five years and apart from
Armenia I’ve been to Brazil, Kenya and Africa. It’s become part of my
life and I really enjoy doing it.”

For now it’s Can’t Buy Me Love and as far as Michelle Collins is
concerned, the drama has a message to be said about money. “Money can
help, but it can’t buy you love,” she feels. “What I hope comes
across is that this couple are in love and that love conquers all.
Love can get you through anything and everything – we hope.”

o Michelle Collins stars in Can’t Buy Me Love on ITV1 on Monday 13
December at 9pm.