Suranne Jones feature

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[Hairy Potter]

is they any reason why I can only se a white box?

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It can take a few seconds to show, but it should work.

try this link http://www.guba.com/watch/3000024408 if that doesn't work then you might need to update either your browser or flash.

[Twirley]

Thanks Face. I started to watch your link then it just kept buffering, so I went to the Guba link. Good stuff - I like Suranne. She was always fun in Corrie, and I've just started watching her in Vincent on BBc America.

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By AmericasNewsToday.Org staff

Suranne Jones -- born Sarah Anne Jones on January 2, 1979 -- is an English actress best known for playing the role of Karen McDonald (née Phillips) in ITV1's Coronation Street over a period of four years. She is also recognisable from an appearance in a high-profile commercial for Maltesers (chocolates) which was filmed shortly before she joined the programme, but frequently screened throughout her early career on the iconic soap opera. She was born in Oldham, Greater Manchester, England and attended a public drama club known as Oldham Theatre Workshop, Antony Cotton who plays Sean Tully on Coronation Street also attended the club.

Before playing Karen McDonald, Jones had a very small role in Coronation Street in April 1997 as Mandy Phillips, a girlfriend of Chris Collins, worked in the theatre and appeared in a short film called Punch opposite fellow soap opera alumnus Jeff Hordley. In 2003, Jones appeared on an edition of Celebrity Stars In Their Eyes as Catherine Zeta Jones and in May 2004 it was announced that she was to leave Coronation Street in November of that year after four years of playing Karen. Jones, who had just won the best actress award at the British Soap Awards left to "explore other roles" with Granada Television, the company that produces Coronation Street.

In Autumn 2005, Jones starred in an ITV's detective drama series Vincent, with Ray Winstone in the title role, this was Jones' first acting role since leaving Coronation Street the previous year. In the same year she starred on the West End stage in A Few Good Men opposite Rob Lowe and appeared in the musical special Celebrate Oliver! which was screened on BBC1.

In 2006, she starred as Snow White in the pantomime Snow White and the Seven Dwarves at the Manchester Opera House alongside Justin Moorhouse and fellow Coronation Street alumnus John Savident. She also appeared in Kay Mellor's Strictly Confidential. On New Year's Day 2007, Jones starred in a Yorkshire and London based black comedy, Dead Clever with Helen Baxendale and Dean Lennox Kelly on ITV 1. Jones has most recently been seen as a guest reporter on the long-running BBC travel programme Holiday alongside Anthony Crank. She has also appeared on Big Brother's Little Brother.

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[alan1254]

I like her i think dead clever was very unfaily bashed by the critics, liked her very much in Vincent she very quickly shook off 'Karen' and showed she could do other things , unfortunatly internet movie data base shows absolutly nothing in production for her so that does not look good

[popinjay]

Anybody have videos of those fights she had on Corrie? I'd very much like to see them again.

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Ex Corrie star Suranne Jones kicked out of bar
15/04/2008

She's no longer a Corrie bad girl but it seems that old habits die hard for Suranne Jones. It looked like the 29-year-old actress was back in a familiar hellraising scene at The Rovers on Saturday night when a private party got a bit out of hand. Bosses at the Manchester bar Tiger Tiger kicked Suranne and her 20-strong group of pals out on to the street because of their "disruptive behaviour". And the star, who shot to fame as feisty Karen McDonald in Corrie, was none too happy about being cast out on the cobbles.

An insider told us: "They were being really rowdy and they didn't like being asked to leave. They kicked up quite a fuss. But there was no way the management was going to let them stay. Everyone had been drinking quite a lot all evening. They spent hundreds of pounds on drinks, mainly Jack Daniel's and Coke."

Suranne has recently landed the role of a posh doctor in ITV1 drama Harley Street. And she was obviously hellbent on letting her hair down during a break from filming, arriving with pals including former T4 presenter Anthony Crank.

Our source says: "Suranne turned up at the club with about 20 people - it was for someone's birthday party. The group had hired out an £85-anhour karaoke pod in the club from 1am to 3am. They had lots of balloons and were obviously celebrating," says our spy. But things turned sour as the night wore on, and the Jack Daniel's began to take its toll. At about 1am the staff noticed the crowd were getting a bit raucous," reveals our spy. "They and the rest of the party were immediately asked to leave. The group were really annoyed because the karaoke pod they had hired didn't come cheap and they weren't allowed to stay and use it."

A spokesman for Tiger Tiger said: "We can confirm that Suranne was there on Saturday night and she and her party were asked to leave at about 1am on Sunday morning. There was not one incident, it was just disruptive behaviour. It was a karaoke party that went a bit over-the-top."

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old habits die hard!

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Suranne Jones offered Corrie DVD spin-off

Suranne Jones, who played the fantabulous Karen McDonald on Coronation Street, tells Inside Soap magazine that she might return to the cobbles. "I've been offered a special featuring Karen and Steve. I can't commit to a proper return, but could do the DVD."

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Interview: Suranne Jones
20th November 2009
thelancasterandmorecambecitizen.co.uk

HAVE you ever laughed so much you cried . . . hysterically?” Suranne Jones asks me as we start to chat. “Well that’s me at work,” she says with a giggle. Suranne is in rehearsals for her latest play, Blithe Spirit, coming to Manchester’s Royal Exchange Theatre in December.

“It’s best to get it out of your system in the early stages. I’m worse on telly when the timescale is even shorter. Somehow that makes it all the funnier,” admits Suranne, who has just finished filming for a new BBC drama, Five Days, set to air in February. “Once in Coronation Street we were filming a scene in the factory and one of the make-up girls had to come up and put a cold flannel on the back of my neck to calm me down,” she recalls. “I remember getting so hysterical that tears were rolling down my face. And I’ve just got the giggles with this play now.”

Suranne, from Oldham, grew up on the stage. Her first professional acting role was at age 10 but the actress revealed she still gets stage fright. “I get nervous with every job because it's the unknown. It’s like starting at a new school. I feel unsettled until I’ve got into my stride. I’m particularly nervous for this play because I love the Royal Exchange. I’ve been coming for years and it makes me very proud to be from Manchester. I lived in London for a while but I’m back living on the outskirts of Manchester again. I feel really settled for the first time in years,” she smiled.

“I live near my best friend Sally Lindsay, who I’ve twice seen do this part, so she keeps telling me I’ll be perfectly fine. New scripts don't leave my side. I get in such a panic to learn them. It might seem I’m a bit behind at the minute because I’ve still got my script in my hand. It’ll work out, though. It always does.”

Suranne made her name as Weatherfield’s feisty Karen McDonald, a part she left five years ago, and she has since worked on a host of TV and theatre productions, including detective drama series Vincent and the highly-acclaimed ITV drama Unforgiven, earlier this year.

But would she ever go back to The Street? “No, I wouldn’t go back to Corrie. I think you should move on. I’m even reluctant to say ‘never say never’ because I definitely don’t want to. I love Coronation Street and the people but I don’t miss it. I like the variety I can do now. I am a bit greedy like that.”

And there is one other thing she has vowed never to do again after playing a bisexual sex therapist in Strictly Confidential, in 2008. “I won’t be taking my clothes off again. I had to do lots of sex scenes in Strictly Confidential and I didn’t like that. It was awful and so embarrassing to film. I think I’ll be keeping covered up in the future.”

In her current role as Ruth Condomine in Blithe Sprit, Suranne looks more like herself. Earlier this year her long dark locks were cut off and bleached blonde — an image Suranne admits she hated. “My character in Collision was a jailbird and to have that blonde hair with the dark roots was perfect for her. Looking so different is disconcerting. It was OK at work, but on days off I’d nip to the shops and you could see people thinking that I’d chosen to look that way. People even said to me that my hair looked nice and I’d think 'you liar!'. I’m much happier as a brunette. I love my hair. In this show we have the finger waves because of the period its set in.”

Noel Coward’s Blithe Spirit is a 1930s comedy which tells the story of a man and wife who hire a medium and get a little more than they bargained for. Suranne, who turned 30 this year, is playing a thirty-something in this production, and she is more than happy to do so. “Turning 30 didn’t bother me at all, like it does a lot of women. I thought it was great because in your mid thirties as an actor you get better parts and it opens the door to roles you were too young for before. Saying that, I’ve played thirty-odd-year-olds for years. I must have an old face, “ she laughs.

And one thirty-something Suranne dreams of portraying is everyone favourite singleton — Bridget Jones. “I’d love to be Bridget Jones but in a TV series. I would like to get together with a writer and create something new. That would be my dream job. I really like that character and I think 30 something women really relate to her.”

BLITHE SPIRIT — Royal Exchange Theatre, Manchester, December 9 to January 23. Tickets on 0161 833 9833.

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No more tears: Why Suranne Jones has plenty to smile about
When she left 'Coronation Street' in 2004, Suranne Jones knew she needed to wash the soap right out of her hair. She tells Gerard Gilbert how her choice of roles has boosted her credibility (...and why she fears John Barrowman's turkey baster)
Sunday, 31 January 2010
LINDA BROWNLEE

You can take the actress out of Coronation Street, but can you take Coronation Street out of the actress? Suranne Jones thinks you can – and that she has. For four years, until a memorable brawl on the roof of the Underworld knicker factory with Tracy Barlow signalled her departure, Jones's character, Karen McDonald (née Phillips), lent a vital spark to Britain's best-loved soap, as a Victoria Beckham wannabe from the wrong side of the tracks.

All Karen wanted was a fancy wedding, and for her and Steve McDonald to become the Posh and Becks of Weatherfield. Unfortunately, Steve turned out to have a Rebecca Loos in his closet, getting the Barlow minx pregnant after a one-night stand. Hence the rooftop tussle that led to Karen's exit from the Street on Boxing Day 2004.

"Karen McDonald was brilliant for three years and I loved playing her", says Jones, who was only 21 when she took on the role 10 years ago. "Then I think you start to repeat yourself, because in soaps you have to. I think they thought I was quite good at emotional stuff and I was doing a lot of crying. Then I'd go to the pub and look at the scripts and there'd be more crying the next day. And I just thought, while she's brilliant and I'm enjoying her, I've got to get out."

I hadn't met with Jones just to reminisce about her long-concluded soap career, however, but to hear about her latest role, heading the cast in BBC1's Five Days – the same title and concept as the Bafta- and Golden Globe-nominated 2007 drama, but with a new cast and story. This one involves ' the discovery of a newborn baby in the toilets of a Yorkshire hospital. At the same time, a trans-Pennine commuter train is halted by a suicidal jumper. Are the incidents connected?

As with the previous series, Five Days will air over five consecutive nights. Jones plays a policewoman who happens to be on the train at the time. "She's 36, was married to a policeman and is now divorced," she says, offering a brisk character breakdown. "She was a detective; she leaves London and returns to her home town in Yorkshire after nearly 17 years to live with her mum, who's got early-onset Alzheimer's. She's in a single bed, in a bungalow, in her mum's house at 36... she's a career woman with flaws. A lot of women out there will relate to that."

And a lot of women out there relate to Suranne Jones (or Sarah Anne Jones, to use her real name; Suranne was adopted from her great-grandmother), judging by her steadily evolving post-Corrie career. She played Ray Winstone's private-eye sidekick in two series of ITV1's Vincent, a bisexual sex therapist in Kay Mellor's Strictly Confidential, appeared opposite Helen Baxendale in the black comedy Dead Clever and played a posh private medic throwing Botox parties in the execrable Harley Street. All this in tandem with a theatrical career that included A Few Good Men with Rob Lowe, and touring the UK as Linda Gray's cancer-stricken daughter in Terms of Endearment.

But what really made critics sit up and take notice was Jones's gawkily raw performance last year in Unforgiven, Sally Wainwright's ITV drama about a woman released from prison after serving 15 years for killing two policemen. "A stunning performance", wrote Brian Viner in his Independent review. "The stuff of Bafta nominations if ever I saw it. Heck, on the back of it she might even get propelled into the movies, and bring a bit of north country sense to the Golden Globes."

The movies can wait – Jones is not the sort to get ahead of herself – but Unforgiven almost certainly secured her the lead in Five Days. "I loved that role", she says. "They don't come along that often. It was seen by the broadsheets as well as the tabloids. It gave me a little bit of credibility, I suppose. The label 'ex-soap star' that the media gives to people... even Anne Reid, who plays my mother in Five Days – she left [Coronation Street] 39 years ago, before I was born, and people are still asking her about her character today. Some people have been at the RSC for years, then get a part in Coronation Street, so it's unfortunate that we have this tag, but we do."

Rather more bothersome than the "soap" tag was the suspicion that she'd picked up some bad habits amid the fast-churning world of continuing drama. "I was very aware of it, so I went to an acting coach, who I still use, and I said, 'I'm worried that I've got all these things in me that I've been switching on because soaps are so fast.' You get directed but sometimes you self-direct as well, so I was just worried that I had all these afflictions. And he said I did."

Jones moved to London, but missed her family and friends in Manchester, finally moving back and buying a house for herself and Baxter, her Jack Russell. Her boyfriend, a half-Italian plumber called Lorenzo Giove, moved out last year. "He never did fix the bathroom", she laughs. "No, we're still friends. We'd known each other for 10 years and that friendship became a relationship then became a friendship again. I work a lot, I work away a lot. It's just me and the dog now."

Not that she's short of male company, having several good gay friends, including her former Street co-star Antony Cotton (camp as Christmas Sean Tully), whom she first met when attending that hotbed of local talent, the Oldham Theatre Workshop – alma mater of Anna Friel, Sarah Lancashire, Jane Danson and Kevin Webster himself, aka Michael Le Vell. ("I first met Antony when I was 12 and he was a tap-dancing rabbit and I was a fireman in a play.")

Another gay friend is John Barrowman, and I was curious about something I'd heard about Jones offering herself as a surrogate mother should Barrowman and his civil partner Scott Gill decide to start a family. What was she thinking? "It may have been fuelled by a few G and Ts", she admits. "It's difficult to remember. We got on like a house on fire and I think it started when we were talking one day and said, 'If we ever had kids, wouldn't they be gorgeous?' And they'd be talented and all singing and dancing, and then, a few G and Ts later... But he's never turned up at my house with a turkey baster.

"In fact, I never get to see him – he's always working, he's the biggest workaholic I know. I've just been doing a Doctor Who spin-off (The Sarah Jane Adventures) and he called me, and said in the way only John can... he calls me 'Pookie', and he said, 'Hey, Pookie, I bet you're in my make-up chair. I bet your bumhole is been where my bumhole has been.'"

Lovely. Jones's plans for 2010 mostly involve charitable work – walking the Great Wall of China for a fireman's charity, and running the London Marathon for a children's cancer charity. She also visits Africa for Christian Aid and conducts musical-theatre workshops for children in Belfast. "I've been going to Belfast now for seven years, twice a year, and love it. In fact, musical theatre is my first love.

"I'm very greedy – I'd like to do everything, or at least give it a go. My plan is to keep doing things that interest me. Ray Winstone – he was dry for a long time after he did Scum, selling things out the back of his car – he said to me [putting on a Cockney accent], "Sare – do the things that you like. It don't matter if it's film or telly or whatever – or if people pay you peanuts – do whatever you like and then you'll be 'appy.'"

'Five Days' airs on BBC1 next month

[Twirley]

I'm really glad she's doing so well for herself. Very talented lady...and beautiful, too! Will have to look into this 5 Days drama - sounds good.

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What Suranne Jones did next
February 17, 2010
Andrew Billen

Let’s try this theory for size. There are three types of soap opera actor. The first is cast in roles very close to their own character and really only ever play themselves. They remain in their soaps for years (William Roache in Coronation Street) or they leave but retain the essential core of the part (the eternal EastEnder Ross Kemp). The second type consists of actors who, out of costume, are nothing like the caricatures they play yet are loyal to them — Sue Nicholls, the daughter of a Tory peer, has been Audrey Roberts in the Street for a quarter of a century. Lastly, there are those brave, talented few who earn their wings on a soap and then fly gloriously beyond it. Sarah Lancashire, once the indelible Raquel in Corrie, is one. The Broadway star Anna Friel, bestower of Brookside’s lesbian kiss, is another.

It is into this third camp that there now comes marching Suranne Jones. For five years Coronation Street’s feisty seamstress Karen McDonald, Jones’s reputation has blossomed in the past 12 months. With her emotionally wrought, deeply affecting performance as the convicted murderer Ruth Slater in ITV’s Unforgiven last winter she might even be held to be responsible for restoring ITV’s reputation for serious drama. Now, via radio plays, a cameo as the Mona Lisa in the children’s TV series The Sarah Jane Adventures and a lauded Blythe Spirit at Manchester Royal Exchange, she is taking the lead in BBC One’s Five Days.

Following, in format only, the first Five Days, broadcast in 2007, Gwyneth Hughes’ superior thriller presents an original take on multi-ethnic Britain and has been granted the serious accolade, last awarded to Criminal Justice, of being run consecutively every evening from March 1. Its cast is first-class. Yet, as you watch the title sequence, Suranne Jones’s name looks not in the least out of place next to those of David Morrissey, Anne Reid and Bernard Hill. The Times was right last month to nominate her for the South Bank Show Breakthrough Award, for broken through she has.

We meet in a club in Soho one lunchtime. Jones, 31, is in terrific shape from training to run the London Marathon and, three days later, to walk the Great Wall of China. “See, this is the really interesting thing,” she says. “When you meet someone and they say, ‘What have you been doing recently? ’ you think: ‘Well, I’ve been doing a lot of great radio for Radio 4. You don’t listen to that, then, and you obviously don’t go to the theatre.’ Then you realise they just mean ‘Why aren’t you in Corrie any more?’ and you stop taking offence.”

Jones’s is an overnight success with years of slog behind it. She took to the stage at 8 and has been acting professionally since she was 16. For a while a commercial for Maltesers — the one in which sweets rolled about a giggly girl’s dashboard — looked as if it might be the acme of her career. A casting director told her agent that Jones was a “bit fat and a bit nothing”.

Then came the big break in Coronation Street, where her performance as Karen deservedly won, in a single year, gongs for best, sexiest and most popular actress. Jones negotiated plots from the comical (engineering a divorce and then a second wedding to her husband) to the melodramatic (a rooftop fight between Karen and her rival Tracy Barlow in which she was assumed guilty of infanticide).

Her gifts as an actress were obvious, but you would not have guessed the naturalism she achieved in Unforgiven to be among them. “Perhaps you do not get reined in as much as you possibly might,” she says tactfully, explaining that in soaps actors self-direct to an extent, as directors assume that they know their characters better than anyone. “Oh God, yeah, Karen was over the top. It is whether people actually care about the light and shade you add once you’ve given them that big over-the-top performance that matters.”

A problem with becoming famous in a soap is that it is really the character who achieves fame. Although last month she lost out in the South Bank Show awards to the artist David Blandy, Jones is grateful that The Times saw that Unforgiven represented a breakthrough for an actress who had moved out of her comfort zone. “People must have gone: ‘Actually, you know, the girl has got a strong pride in what she does and she’s stuck to it’ .”

She praises Sally Wainwright’s script for Unforgiven and David Evans’s direction, but it is clear that much of her isolated, abused, emotionally and verbally inarticulate Ruth was of her own devising. She visited a women’s prison and noted how the long-term inmates avoided eye-contact, were in awe of commonplace technology such as the mobile phone and had become institutionalised by the bureaucracy of prison. Cut off from society at a young age, many were in a state of retarded adolescence. Although she is not, she insists, a Method actor, she refrained from mixing with the rest of the cast during the shoot. “I wanted to be on my own,” she says.” I didn’t want to start socialising in the bar and analysing my performance.”

Reviewing the serial, I wrote that her performance would not disgrace a Ken Loach film and Loach has, indeed, since auditioned her. “We got a lovely e-mail saying he liked me, so, hopefully, one day . . .”

The seriousness with which she tackled the potentially unrewarding role of Ruth squares with her Corrie pre-history, a story of dedication not to stardom, but to acting. Born in Oldham and brought up in Chadderton, Greater Manchester, she was blessed with such energy as a child that her father, an engineer, and her mother, who worked as a secretary by day and a cleaner by night, paid for her lessons in tap, ballet, modern dance, violin, singing and drama. She was picked on at school, partly because she was bigger than most of the girls, puberty having struck early. Then her mother became ill with breast cancer and she took time off school. When she returned she was annoyed that teachers still talked to her as though she were a child. She said she wanted to be actor. They wondered on her behalf about hairdressing.

By then, however, she was a devoted member of Oldham Theatre Workshop, whose founder, David Johnson, instilled in her “discipline like you wouldn’t believe”. Having found an agent (at 15) and changed her first name from Sarah to Suranne for Equity reasons, she took a BTEC diploma in performing arts and left to embark on a tour of Rita, Sue and Bob Too. “Much to my father’s dismay. He didn’t want to see his 16-year-old daughter going round the country in a 2CV taking her pants off.” She did rep in the Isle of Man, panto in Belfast, and joined a Theatre in Education company called Cragrats, among whose triumphs was a piece on diversity performed for bin men in Blackburn: “They loved it. We finished with an Abba song.”

Only 21 when she moved into Weatherfield, Jones made what she now regards as the classic mistake of letting the press buy into her personal life. An OK! photoshoot celebrated her engagement to Jim Phelan, an IT man she had met at the V Festival. “Then we split up and it was suddenly: ‘Wow! Why would you do that?’ ”

The papers later became excited by her relationship with the older actor Jonathan Wrather (Joe Carter in Corrie). In the past few years, however, it seemed as if her love life had stabilised when she moved in with a man her own age who was not in showbusiness. But she and Lorenzo Giove split up a year ago and she is now single. “We’d known each other for ten years and we were friends who became lovers. Then, when I spent a lot of time working away during our three-year relationship . . .”

The upshot was tHat the friendship survived but not the romance. She admits that the pressure she put on herself to settle down was partly the result of being from a working-class family, most of whom married in their twenties. “I did go through a little bit of therapy because I did have the panic of ‘Why hasn’t it worked out?’ I think a big part of me when I was younger wanted to tie everything up in a bow, get married, have a baby, get the dog, get the house, just so that all that was settled and I could then go: ‘Right, now I’m going to go and enjoy myself without feeling guilty’.”

By “enjoy” herself, Jones means act. Her parents call her a workaholic. “But I have a real love for what I do, and I can’t help that.”

She left Corrie with the intention of pursuing both television and theatre work. On stage she has starred in Snow White and A Few Good Men and toured with Linda Grey (of Dallas) in Terms of Endearment. It took longer for TV to present her with the right vehicle. The tone of a black comedy, Dead Clever, in which she played opposite Helen Baxendale, was, she thinks, misunderstood. Vincent, with Ray Winstone, is not much remembered. Strictly Confidential — the last time she proposes to strip on TV — is deservedly forgotten. Critics nevertheless waited for 2008 and ITV’s glossy Harley Street to savage her personally. She remains loyal to it. “The gloss label came before it even aired, and then the question of whether people could see me as the [posh southern] character I was playing. Someone even said I looked too northern!”

I confess I hated it. “But how are you ever going to learn if you don’t take those risks?” she says. “Doing something I’m scared of but really want to do is what I’m really all about.” In the future these parts could, she says, include Portia in The Merchant of Venice and Kate in The Taming of the Shrew. “I think,” she adds, “I am a little too young for Lady Macbeth, but I’d like to tick that off too.” We we may have to invent a new category for ex-soap actors — one just for Suranne Jones.

Five Days starts on March 1 on BBC One (9pm)

[Twirley]

Oooh Face - are you going to cap Five Days? Please !!!