Jackie Clune

Jackie Clune

There are many sides to Jackie Clune, both professionally and personally. She has embraced very different roles and lifestyles: fringe actress, cabaret singer, West End leading lady, university drama tutor, radio broadcaster, outspoken cheerleader for lesbian causes and now a happily partnered heterosexual mother of four young children (three of them triplets). As a mother herself, she is embracing matriarchal stage roles with a particular kind of lived experience—but she also knows what it is to have to shout above the crowd to be noticed. She’s appeared in Boy George’s Taboo playing a mum, then in Mamma Mia! playing another. And now she’s a perfect fit for yet one more, Mrs. Wilkinson, the brassy, ballsy dance teacher who sets Billy Elliot on his path toward becoming a professional dancer. As she told Theatre.com, she played an early role in shaping the part itself, so being in the show now was ultimately perhaps meant to be.

It's great to see you in the West End now as one of the leads in Billy Elliot.
I was involved in some of the workshops for Billy Elliot that were done for the show three years ago, just after I’d had my first child. I went to audition [for the workshop] and found myself in front of Stephen Daldry, Peter Darling and various other people. Stephen and I share a parallel history in terms of our sexuality—he married and had a child and all of that, too, but was a notorious homosexual before, so we got chatting about all that and we got on really well. He is very irreverent and unconventional. So it was not like any other audition I’d ever been to. They were trying to workshop the character of Mrs. Wilkinson, in particular her number “Shine,” which is her first number with the ballet girls. He ended up asking me to come along and do a couple of weeks’ work on the show, and we workshopped that number and her character quite a bit. Then there was about six months where every time I ran into him at various do’s, I’d badger him and say, “Are you giving me that part? I want that part.” He’d say, “Just wait, just wait,” but I had a feeling that it wasn’t going to go my way. Then as it turned out, I fell pregnant with triplets, and I actually came to see the first night of Billy Elliot a week before I had them.

So just as they were giving birth to the show, you were about to do the same thing.
I loved the show. And Stephen always said to me, “You will do it at some point.” After I had the triplets, I went to do the tour of Mamma Mia!. I had done it for a year and was thinking of carrying on for another six months, but then I decided I had to be in London with the kids as it had all gone on for a bit long now. I used to come back to London every week more or less, but it was hard. And then two weeks before I finished in Mamma Mia! I got a call saying, “We’re re-casting Mrs. Wilkinson, will you go up for it?” And just four days after leaving Mamma Mia! I got this job, having thought, what am I doing—giving up such a great role, and such a great salary, and jumping into unemployment with four kids? But then it was just four days and I got this.

So you’ve come full circle after all, having done that early workshop.
It would have been amazing to be in the original cast, but Stephen has very generously always said that I put some of the funniest lines in the show into it. And they’ve given me carte blanche to put one-liners in now and muck about, though I haven’t quite done that yet. It’s difficult to do that when you’ve got kids onstage with you. Some of them are fantastic and roll with anything new you put in, but others will look at you bewildered.

That's how you began, isn't it? Writing your own shows?
I actually did a drama degree at the University of Kent, and then I went into fringe theatre. I was in the same year as Alan Davies, and at one point we talked of doing a comedy double act and I said no, you go off and do that on your own, and he’s now a huge star. I went into women’s theatre instead. It was the '80s and we were very political. And then I sidelined for a long while into academia—I taught drama at the Royal Holloway College, which is part of London University. I was mainly teaching acting and directing, and it was great and intellectually very stimulating and challenging. I kept doing fringe stuff in the long vacations, and then I started singing and doing comedy and I very quickly started realising that if I wanted to earn a living doing this, that I either wouldn’t get or didn’t want a lot of the roles that were out there. So I started doing my own thing. I’ve got more to say than just being somebody’s actor. I wanted to be a bit more creative. And if I hadn’t done that, I don’t know what I’d be doing now because I don’t think I would have got here by going the conventional route.

Jackie Clune in Billy Elliot

Do you feel you've had a late blooming as a West End leading lady?
It’s weird. I don’t know whether I’ve always been an old trout waiting to happen, but I never would have been a juve lead. There’s something a bit too cynical about me and a bit too knowing.

And intelligence?
Maybe that’s the word. And let’s face it; there aren’t a great deal of intelligent roles for women in musical theatre until you reach your forties. Then there’s this, there’s Mamma Mia!, there’s Mrs. Johnstone in Blood Brothers, which I was considering doing before I got this job.

It’s no coincidence, perhaps, that they’re all mums. How old are your children?
The eldest is three and a half, and the triplets are two.