Sheridan Smith

Bafta and Olivier award winning actress Sheridan Smith now has a record deal. The star of stage and screen signed the recording contract with East West Records, which is owned by Warner Music and is home to such names as Jools Holland, Robert Plant and Bette Midler.

Sheridan Smith said in a statement:

1. “It has been an ambition since a child to record my own album so I’m incredibly excited to be recording some of my favourite songs.”

Sheridan comes from a musical family. Her great-great-grandfather, Benjamin Doubleday, a respected banjo player in Yorkshire later played as a trio with his daughters. Performing since she was a child Sheridan sang alongside her parents Colin and Marilyn, who performed as country music duo The Daltons. They toured the working men’s clubs near their home in north Lincolnshire. Her father died in 2016, aged 80, having lost his battle against cancer.

In 2015 she received an OBE for services to drama, awarded by Prince William.

Though she never trained at drama school, between 1995 and 2001 Sheridan was a member of the National Youth Music Theatre, performing lead roles in productions including Into the Woods and Pendragon. She made her West End debut in a National Youth Music Theatre production of Bugsy Malone and has performed in musicals Little Shop of Horrors and Funny Girl. She won two Laurence Olivier Awards for Best Actress in a Musical as Elle Woods in Legally Blonde in 2011 and Best Performance in a Supporting Role as Doris in a revival of the play Flare Path in 2012. Recently she has been nominated for the Best Actress in a Musical award for her work in Funny Girl.

Her first taste of fame came in 1999 when she played Emma, Ralph Little’s girlfriend, in hit TV comedy The Royle Family alongside Ricky Tomlinson and the late Caroline Aherne. Two years later she could be found playing Janet in the long-running series Two Pints of Lager and a Packet of Crisps until her departure from the show in 2009. There have been many other projects from an episode of ITV’s The Royal to The Lenny Henry Show. She featured as Rudi in the second and third series of the BBC Three sitcom Gavin & Stacey. Sheridan guest starred in the Christmas 2008 episode of Lark Rise to Candleford. Her appearance in The Moorside, which chronicled the notorious kidnapping of nine-year-old Shannon Matthews in 2008 saw Sheridan pile on the pounds for her role as Julie. Then she had to lose it for future roles.

In 2014, she appeared in the ITV crime drama The Widower as first wife of serial killer Malcolm Webster. She featured in the TV series Who Do You Think You Are? and played Cilla Black in the three-part ITV drama series Cilla.

In 2017, it was announced that she would star in the television adaptation of children’s bestseller book written by David Walliams, Ratburger, as the Evil Step-mum Sheila. It must have been going well because David invited her to his 46th birthday party in September 2017 when dating American model Graham Nation.

Aged four Sheridan learned to dance and was singing by the time she was seven years old. Her brother Damien is lead singer of the band, The Torn. Sheridan’s oldest brother Julian tragically died from cancer in 1990 aged 18.

Sheridan appears in the 2018 feature film The More You Ignore Me based on the novel written by Jo Brand in which she stars as main character Gina.