Review of A Mind of My Own by Kathy Burke – A brilliant, frank, beautiful memoir | books

yourAthy Burke’s mother, Bridget, died of stomach cancer when she was 18 months old; She wrote that it made her “feel famous” in her community. She was raised by her older brothers, John and Barry, who were 10 and 8 when it happened, and sometimes by their father, Pat, who had been an alcoholic for many years, was violent with him, and struggled to take care of his family. Pat and Bridget moved to London from Ireland, and the Burks lived on an estate in Islington, where other families played a vital role in raising and feeding the children. On his deathbed, in 1994, Pat asked Cathy to do two things: quit smoking, and write more. It only took 30 years, she says, but she finally did it.

The entertainment industry is full of people from middle and upper class backgrounds who have a limited understanding of life that is nothing like their own. In my experience, one of the misconceptions they have about working-class life is that life is all gray skies and kitchen sink misery. Burke’s memoirs contain painful moments, but the joy that radiates from them is clear and vivid.

As a little girl, she remembers circling the ice cream truck (“the usual line of children forming a multi-colored snake,” she wrote with delight) near her apartment building. A strange woman appears and announces that she has won a game of bingo, and offers to buy her ice cream. “Oh, aren’t you ugly,” she said to Burke with breathtaking cruelty. She is devastated and turns her mortification into humor. “I’m the best dancer in the ugly bug ball,” she joked, performing a dance that made everyone laugh.

The story is told, and soothing the hurt with humor becomes a theme. Burke sometimes evades deeper wounds, hinting at a bad love affair but keeping it out of focus. Stories of kindness come more easily, and she encountered many of them as a child. Her teenage years in the 1970s and 1980s involved playing pinball around London, and she was interested in punk and possibility music. She bumps into Johnny Rotten, panics about what to say to him, and then simply screams at him to “fuck off.” She fronted the Clash, and almost became their roadie before deciding to take a place at the legendary Anna Scher theater school instead. This decision leads to a long career as an actor, writer, and director.

Burke is probably best known for her funny roles. Her early days of live comedy seem both chaotic and exhilarating. On stage with music duo Raw Sex at Chelsea Barracks, their raucous performance draws boos and jeers. She responds by shouting “Give Ireland back to the Irish!” Before they all beat a hasty retreat. During the 1990s, she appeared in Absolutely Fabulous, then became very popular co-starring in Harry Enfield’s sketch shows. Their boy characters, Kevin and Perry (Perry, named him after a friend), even got their own movie.

But she offers plenty of reminders that she was also a serious actress, though she was rarely taken as seriously as she deserved. In 1997, she won the Best Actress award at Cannes for her exceptional performance in her old colleague Gary Oldman’s film Nil By Mouth. However, elsewhere, a producer expresses surprise at her ability to speak an accent other than her own. There’s a bit of interest in Danny Boyle, with whom I worked on a TV miniseries called Mr Wroe’s Virgins; She likened him to “an arrogant priest from my childhood.” (Which is better than her co-star Kerry Fox, whom she calls a “charmless prick.”) In the film Elizabeth, she plays an unforgettably ailing Mary Tudor. Her director, Shekhar Kapoor, suggests that Burke may need extra help, as she is not the type who would normally play a queen. “I didn’t know when we met that you were working class,” he told her. Burke recalls all of this with a frustrated sneer, but pay attention and you can tell the anger rising from the page.

A resume is rarely as straightforward as it could be, for several reasons. If this represents the watered-down version of Burke’s life, I can only imagine what it would be like to hear her tell it at full speed. The story of A Mind of My Own ends abruptly, when she decides she wants to stop acting to focus on theater directing, announcing her retirement on SMTV Live, a Saturday morning children’s program hosted by Ant and Dec. I hope she writes about what comes next, because whether she’s in the spotlight or not, her stories are alive and bright and beautiful.