Hesmondhalgh plays ordinary northern women who have been handed something they did not ask for, and she plays them without a flicker of self-pity. Sixteen years on Coronation Street built the habit; the third series of Broadchurch showed what it is for.
Fi1m perspective
Watch what Julie Hesmondhalgh does not do as Trish Winterman in the third series of Broadchurch (2017). Chris Chibnall and Louise Fox hand her an assault on a grown woman, the kind of subject that invites an actor to break down on cue and be admired for it. Hesmondhalgh declines. She keeps her voice level and gets on with the scene, and the effect is far worse than tears would have been. We found ourselves wanting to look away on her behalf, and that is the measure of it: she makes you feel the indignity of having to say it out loud. The series has the sense not to decorate what she is doing, and it does not need to.
The habit was learned over a long time. From 1998 to 2014 she was Hayley Cropper on Coronation Street, the first transgender character in a British soap, opposite David Neilson's Roy. A part held that long usually flattens an actor into a set of tics. Hayley did not, and the storyline that took her out of the programme was as well received as anything she did in it.
Since leaving she has gone where the good writers are. Russell T Davies's Cucumber (2015), Sally Wainwright's Happy Valley (2016), Broadchurch, then Doctor Who (2018), a reformer in Mike Leigh's Peterloo (2018), The Pact (2021) and Mr Bates vs The Post Office (2024). The list has a pattern. A transgender life, violence against women, a miscarriage of justice: she keeps ending up in dramas with a wrong at the centre of them. She has said that when the call came for Broadchurch she did not ask, "Well, what's the part? Is there an issue attached to it?" We believe her. The issues find her anyway, because producers know she will not turn them into speeches.
The risk in an actor this plain is that the plainness becomes a mannerism of its own, and the parts start to look alike: another decent woman, another injustice, another level voice. On the evidence of Broadchurch she has not fallen into it, because the level voice there is a decision and you can see what it costs her to keep it. The complaint that does follow her about is fainter, and it is not really about her: after sixteen years on the country's best-known soap, she is still less prominent than that run would suggest.
That is television's failure of imagination rather than hers. Give her a hard scene and a writer who will let her underplay it, and she will not waste either.
Biography
Julie Hesmondhalgh is an English actress. Born on 25 February 1970 in Accrington, Lancashire, she trained at the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art from 1988 to 1991.
She is best known for playing Hayley Cropper (originally Hayley Patterson) in the ITV soap opera Coronation Street from 1998 to 2014. Her performance in the character's exit storyline won her the National Television Award for Best Serial Drama Performance and the British Soap Award for Best Actress, both in 2014. Other television roles include Trish Winterman in Broadchurch (2017), Amanda Wadsworth in Happy Valley (2016), Cleo Whitaker in Cucumber (2015) and Judy Maddox in Doctor Who (2018). She appeared as a female reformer in the film Peterloo (2018) and received a BAFTA nomination for Best Supporting Actress for her work in Broadchurch.
