Sue Cleaver has opened up on her ‘tragic’ teenage years as she fell pregnant with a man twice her age.
On the cobbles of Coronation Street her character Eileen Grimshaw is known as a straight-talker who doesn’t suffer fools gladly. It takes a brave person to cross her – whether she’s brawling in the street with Gail Platt or putting people in their place in the Rovers Return.
But as actress Sue prepares to return to the Street after a summer on the West End, she has opened up about her hidden fears. As reported by the Mirror, she has revealed that she used to be too terrified to even speak to her fans because of her own insecurities.
Sue confessed: “For quite a few years, if somebody came up to me in the street, the inside of my stomach muscles would tense up and I’d be thinking: ‘Oh God, don’t come over. Don’t come over. Don’t come over. It absolutely terrified me when people did. I’d be thinking: ‘I’ve got nothing to offer you. I don’t know what to say. I don’t know what to do.’ It was fear, pure and simple. I don’t think I handled it well at all. My confident exterior was paper-thin.”
Sue explains how her insecurities set in as a teenager, where, full of self-doubt, she found herself being taken advantage of by older boyfriends. As a teenager she lost her virginity to an older boy, at 16 she ran off with a sailor and lived in a bedsit and at 17 she found herself pregnant after falling for a 35-year-old man.
“I looked for love and validation and acceptance in all the wrong places and my first sexual encounters were with somebody who was four or five years older than me,” Sue says. “Nowadays that would just be unthinkable, but it wasn’t at the time. It was no-one’s fault and my parents, who were fantastic, only ever tried to do their best for me, but like a lot of teenagers I was lost. Nowadays there is awareness around mental health, but when I was that age, we had no concept of it and when I look back, I was very unhappy. I’d never want to re-live that time again.”
At 60, Sue has clocked up a quarter of a century at Coronation Street and is now also a regular panellist on the lunchtime chat show Loose Women, but as a teenager she found herself struggling to fit in. She’s been sharing her story for the first time ahead of the release of her candid and at times heartbreaking new memoir A Work in Progress. And it’s a far cry from the feisty Eileen we see on screen.
“There were boyfriends, one-night stands. I convinced myself that ‘Oh, if I do this, they will love me’. I was always searching for a way to belong,” she says. “It was tragic really and it breaks my heart to think about it now. There’s so much shame wrapped up in my teenage years. I was just searching and searching for someone to make me feel okay. Because I didn’t know how to be okay myself. So, I became really promiscuous.”
Sue went off the rails at school and began to make bad choices, thinking nothing of hitchhiking or walking home in the dark. By 15 she had a steady boyfriend, but left him for his older brother, a sailor in the Navy. At 16 she quit school with no qualifications, and moved to Plymouth to live with him in a bedsit.
Lonely and bored she eventually moved back to Manchester to live with her parents. But after hanging out with an older crowd at a local wine bar, she ended up pregnant at 17 by a 35-year-old man. “Again, that was somebody who was way older than me and took advantage,” Sue says. “Now it’s appalling to think of myself at that young age in that situation with men who should know better.”
Knowing she wouldn’t be able to cope with a baby, Sue booked herself in for an abortion, without telling a soul what she was going through. She says: “I was in absolute turmoil. I eventually told my Mum – I said: ‘This has happened, I’m going to the hospital on this date, can I have a lift and can we not tell Dad’. I don’t think we ever spoke about it again, but that was my choice. I don’t think we knew how to. My dad never knew. I look back and think I was so resilient. I just got on and I dealt with stuff.”
At 17 Sue moved to Canada to work as a nanny. When she returned to Britain she went to drama school, where she fell in love with her first serious boyfriend. “He was a really lovely guy but he was a grown-up and although I was 23, emotionally I was still a kid,” Sue says. “There were lots of problems and I think most of them stemmed from the fact that he was established, with a career and business and what did I bring to the table financially? Absolutely jack s**t. It made me vow, even at that young age, that I would never, ever allow myself not to earn my own money.”
At 26, Sue met and married actor James Quinn and the couple had son Elliott, 28. She went on to launch a successful TV career with roles in shows including Dinnerladies and Band of Gold. Then in 2000 she landed the role that was to make her name, that of Coronation Street’s feisty cab switchboard operator Eileen Grimshaw. A quarter of a century later she is one of the show’s most popular stars.
The actress was unlucky in love again when her first marriage ended in divorce in, but she now lives in Manchester with her second husband, lighting technician Brian Owen. By opening up about her past, she believes it helps her reevaluate how strong she really is. And now she’s hoping her book will help other women remember their value and shed their insecurities – for like her book title, she’s still a work in progress but she’s slowly becoming more like her alter-ego in the confidence stakes.
“When I look back at my teenage self, I just want to give her a big hug,” she reflects. “But it was all part of my journey to becoming who I am now. My God, I learnt resilience and independence. I don’t have all the answers. I am a work in progress. I’m human and humans are naturally messy and will over-think things, but I hope my book will help any woman who is at the stage of their life where they feel invisible and powerless. We’re all doing the best we can, muddling our way through and I just want every woman to see for themselves how much they have to offer.”
Sue, who was adopted at 10 days old, also tells in the book the incredible story of how she met her birth mother. In 1986, aged 23, Sue won a small part in the play Oedipus at Manchester’s Royal Exchange Theatre. But when her co-star Michael N Harbour saw her, he went white. He declared to the stage manager: “Oh my God, she’s the spitting image of my wife when I met her.”
Despite their age gap Sue and 41-year-old Michael became firm friends. Writing in her new memoir, Sue says: “I was completely obsessed with him and fascinated by his stories about his family, I wasn’t sure why.”
One Sunday the cast got together for a lunch party and Michael started making fun of Sue’s Northern accent before asking where she was born and her date of birth. When she answered that she was actually born in Barnet, Greater London, not the North and that she was born on September 2, 1963, Michael immediately called his wife Lesley, announcing: ‘I’ve found her.’
It turned out that Sue’s birth mother Lesley Sizer Grieve had given her up for adoption when she was a 17 year-old single mum, five years before meeting Michael.
Sue (whose birth name was Claire Grieve) was adopted by a young couple Fred and John Cleaver and she went to live with them and their five year-old son Paul. Lesley and Michael meanwhile went on to have two teenage daughters who had no idea they had a half-sister. But Michael knew his wife had always wondered about her eldest child – the resemblance was so strong and the dates matched and he just knew he had found her.
Michael broke the news to Sue, telling her: ‘You are my wife’s daughter,’ and took her to meet Lesley in a hotel. Sue says: “The walk to the door felt like it went on forever. I felt such a mixture of anticipation, excitement, fear and adrenaline. We embraced and just talked and talked until 5am.”
“It was almost like a love story. The first two weeks were very heady; we had to be around each other, we had to call each other. She never ever felt like my mum. My Mum who brought me up is [my] mum. But there was a definite attachment.”
Sadly, Lesley died at the start of the pandemic, but Sue adds: “I’ve got two lovely half-sisters. I’m close to them and I see Kate, the youngest one, quite a bit. My Mum and Dad were so welcoming; Lesley came to my father’s funeral. It’s very much like [we’re] part of a bigger family; it’s been lovely.”
In another incredible twist, her cobbles’ co-star Helen Worth (Gail Platt) was once flatmates with Lesley. “She knew that Lesley had this child [she’d given up],” Sue says. “And Helen is Godmother to one of my half-sisters!”
Sue, who is a panellist on the ITV lunchtime chat show Loose Women, says the discovery never affected her relationship with her parents or her brother Paul. The actress, whose memoir is out on Thursday, says: “I’ve only ever had one mum and she was so warm and generous. There was no jealousy; she welcomed Lesley with open arms and told her she could visit anytime.”
A Work in Progress by Sue Cleaver is published in hardback by Bloomsbury Publishing on Sept 26, £20
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