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Actress Leslie Ash talks tabloid lies, living with disability and that Leeds United chant INTERVIEW
ALL THE SINGLE LADIES: Leslie, centre, with Tara Flynn, left, and Brook Kinsella.
Leslie Ash and husband Lee Chapman were once Leeds’ answer to Posh and Becks. Now the actress tells Grant Woodward why her return to the city has so much riding on it.
The way Leslie Ash sees it, when she sets foot on stage in Leeds next month it will mark the beginning of a new chapter in her life.
After the trials and tribulations of the last few years, it’s easy to see why the Men Behaving Badly star is relishing the chance to start again.
She famously bore the brunt of public ridicule when a procedure to have her lips cosmetically enhanced went disastrously wrong, with the tabloids revelling in her resulting ‘trout pout’.
Then, in 2005, she caught the superbug MSSA while in hospital with a cracked rib and punctured lung, the infection attacking her spine and leaving her permanently injured.
At the time the severity of her condition was lost amid the fevered speculation as to how she ended up in hospital in the first place.
Renowned for their fiery marriage that once saw Ash seek refuge at the home of her co-star Caroline Quentin and take out an injunction against him, police initially arrested her husband, former Leeds United striker Lee Chapman, on suspicion of assault.
The couple insisted she was hurt as a result of drunken bedroom fumbling, but if the whispers surrounding them have refused to go away then so too have the long-term effects of the bug, which at one stage led to fears she could be left paralysed or even die.
Today Ash, 51, walks with the aid of a cane. But this stage school graduate, who first appeared on TV at the age of four, asking “Mummy, why are your hands so soft?” in an advert for Fairy Liquid, remains resolutely philosophical.
“I’m disabled now and that’s not going to ever get better,” she says, sounding like someone who’s determined to confront the truth head on, no matter how hard it is to digest.
“I’m really looking at this (play) as a new start and I’m just hopeful I will be able to carry on in an industry I’ve loved for so many years as a disabled actress.”
She is returning to Leeds for her role in All The Single Ladies, a series of monologues that blend drama with bittersweet comedy.
Ash plays the seven-times married Liz, who is still on the look out for love.
“It ticks the box that it’s on stage and I really want to have that feeling of playing to a live audience,” she says. “Plus it’s a fantastic part and a really funny play.
“Going on tour brings with it a different dynamic. I haven’t done it for about 17 years so it’s like starting all over again. I was looking for something to do that wouldn’t be too strenuous and this is perfect.
“The only thing,” she adds, suddenly sounding a little nervous, “is the brain needs to remember all the lines. But I’m sure the audiences will pull me through.”
Coming back to Yorkshire is something she is looking forward to.
Ash made her home here when husband Lee was helping Leeds United win the Second Division championship in 1990 before finishing top goal scorer as the Whites lifted the old First Division title two years later.
The pair were a prototype Posh and Becks during their time in the city. He the successful sportsman, she a well-known face on TV.
Ash describes it as “the time of our lives” and says she has fantastically fond memories of the period.
Her sons Joe and Max, now 23 and 19, were born here and though the family lived in Boroughbridge, Ash and Chapman were regulars on the Leeds social scene, which played a big part in their decision a few years later to open their ill-fated restaurant and members’ bar Teatro.
The swanky venue on Concordia Street in the city centre, near where the Malmaison hotel is today, enjoyed a star-studded opening in June 2000 but closed just a year later.
I mention that there are plenty of venues of its kind in Leeds now, but it perhaps paid the price for being a bit ahead of its time.
“I’m pleased you’ve said that because that’s exactly what happened, really,” says Ash. “Lee obviously had a fantastic connection with Leeds. After we’d opened the one in Shaftesbury Avenue in London and saw how well it was doing a lot of our friends who came down from Leeds would say, ‘Oh, we wish you could open one in Leeds, it would be fantastic.’
“So of course we did, but unfortunately a lot of people in Leeds only go out on a Friday or Saturday night and you can’t run a business like that on just two nights a week.
“It was before its time but it was gorgeous. I loved it. I remember dear old (Countdown host) Richard Whiteley sitting there, we used to have such a laugh with him.”
Along with the failure of Teatro, there is another reason why Ash’s name is still closely associated with Leeds.
During Eric Cantona’s short stay at Elland Road there was an infamous terrace chant which suggested she was on intimate terms with the enigmatic Frenchman. Looking back, I wonder if that bothered her at the time or whether she was able to laugh it off as bawdy terrace ‘humour’?
Ash says she would rather not talk about it, which suggests it was the former, except to confirm that any claims she and Cantona were romantically linked are ludicrous.
“(The former Leeds United manager) Howard Wilkinson stood up at the recent ’92 reunion dinner at Elland Road and he admitted the reasons why Cantona left,” she says. “They were nothing to do with me, as people were trying to suggest. But that is indicative of what was happening at the time.”
What she’s referring to is the huge amount of media scrutiny that by now had zeroed in on the couple.
It didn’t help that their relationship was a tempestuous one, with Ash admitting that the couple drank heavily and rowed frequently.
They had met in a nightclub when she was 26 and it was a stormy relationship from the start, regularly involving jealous rows when football groupies threw themselves at Lee.
Later, their partying as glamorous club-owners saw them rub shoulders with the likes of Mick Jagger, George Michael, Kate Moss and Robbie Williams, but it all took its toll on their marriage.
“Sometimes Lee would come home only at breakfast time, arriving while I was eating my toast,” Ash wrote in her autobiography My Life Behaving Badly. “The nights when I did go out would end in drunken rows, though we were forever apologising afterwards and never argued on our sober days.”
She has said in previous interviews that she and Chapman have a “passionate relationship” but, despite what others might say, she is not locked in a violent marriage.
“I know with my husband what buttons to hit,” she has said. “He does with me. But that’s marriage. It can be cruel, but life is cruel.”
Ash says Chapman has been a source of great support during her recent struggles. She jokes that she’s hoping to persuade him to come up to Leeds to see her in the play.
Last year the couple enjoyed a personal victory over the gossip-mongers when they secured an out-of-court settlement against the News of the World, having sued the paper over suspicions that their voicemails and those of their children were illegally accessed by private investigator Glenn Mulcaire.
They now plan to take action against other newspapers.
“Over the years Lee and I have been under constant scrutiny from the tabloids and we could never really take them on when it was just the two of us.
“So one thing I’m pleased about is that now people will realise all the things they read about us were lies, they just weren’t true.
“People now know that you can’t believe everything you read in the newspapers. But for a while it wasn’t like that. It was terrible trying to prove your innocence in anything they printed.
“The thing is that we always knew the truth. As long as you know it and your family knows it, it shouldn’t really matter. But it does matter.
“It is very upsetting, but at the same time Lee and I knew a lot of these journalists so we’re not jumping for joy, but I am pleased they’ve been found out.”
As an actress, Ash found success early in her career. She was still a teenager when she played the romantic lead in seminal Brit-flick Quadrophenia and has since had roles in hit shows including C.A.T.S Eyes, Holby City, Where The Heart Is and Merseybeat.
But it was Men Behaving Badly, and her role as Tony and Gary’s glamorous neighbour Debs, that really made her.
Perhaps the defining sitcom of the 1990s, the show was a reaction against the onset of the caring, sharing ‘new man’. It revelled in a politically incorrect world of booze, burps and boobs.
Giggling
Ash happened to catch sight of an episode the other day and found herself giggling at “Neil Morrissey’s head popping out of a caravan”.
“He just looked so young, but then we all were,” she says. “I think of Men Behaving Badly as quite important in the world of comedy on television and I’m very proud of that, I really am.
“It used to take us ages to get through the read-throughs because it was just so funny. What everyone brought to their characters as well, stuff that (show creator) Simon Nye didn’t write, you can see in the wonderful performances that Neil, Martin, Caroline and I tried to give.”
At the time the show’s brand of comedy was seen as being pretty close-to-the-knuckle, even giving rise to allegations that it verged on the misogynistic. But Ash is having none of it.
“You know what everyone’s like,” she scoffs. “As soon as something’s successful in our country we try and find fault with it.
“People wanted to say it was sexist, but of course it wasn’t sexist. It was girls having a laugh at the boys and the boys having a good old laugh at themselves.”
Her upcoming appearance at the City Varieties may be considerably more low-key, but it’s apparent that for Ash it represents more than just another role. It’s a chance for her to prove she still has a future in acting.
The £5m compensation payout she received as a result of her hospital infection means she need never work again. But for someone who has known little but showbusiness since the age of four, that’s clearly out of the question.
“This is a fantastic part for me,” she says of her role in All The Single Ladies. “I’m at a time of my life now, being in my 50s, when I enjoy playing a character part rather than just the leggy blonde.
“I want to perform in this industry but I realise it’s going to be different. But if you’ve got a career you love it’s very difficult just to stop.
“I’ve been so lucky and I don’t want people to think she’s disabled and write me off. I am disabled and there’s a lot of us. And we should be able to work.”
* Leslie Ash stars in All The Single Ladies at Leeds City Varieties from February 13 to 15. For tickets call 0113 243 08 08 or visit: www.cityvarieties.co.uk
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Wednesday 23 May 2012
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