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I started acting when I got a cockroach in my pants ... now I'm
Sunday Mirror, Mar 11, 2001 by COLIN WILLS
I CAN'T help feeling that what the world really lacks is a first- hand description of Jim Royle's arse.
In The Royle Family, the old layabout is always using the word, but you never get to see it. What's it like? Well-formed? Muscular? Lard-like? Spotty? I think we should be told.
One person who does know is Denise Black, who has just shot a nude love scene with Royle family star Ricky Tomlinson.
It is the first time Ricky, 60, has cavorted in the buff for the cameras and, according to him, "when Denise first saw me she fell about laughing".
Denise doesn't recall being so cruel. "We gave each other support because we were nervous," she says.
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Denise, 42 - best known for her three years on Coronation Street as sexy hairdresser Denise Osbourne - plays Ricky's mistress in the BBC1 series Clocking Off.
They pursue their screen affair behind the back of Ricky's wife, played by Kate Fitzgerald. "Our liaison doesn't last long," Denise says. "It's more of a fumble than a sexual set-piece, if you know what I mean."
When the scene is screened next month it is sure to cause controversy, as Ricky's screen wife suffers from multiple sclerosis, and Denise is her carer "It's a very nasty triangle," Denise admits.
"But although it is easy to condemn whatour characters do, nothing is clear-cut in life. You can say they are being callous and disloyal, but physical drives are very strong too, aren't they?"
Since leaving Coronation Street five years ago, Denise has played mistresses, prostitutes and femme fatales of all kinds.
"They're great fun", she says. "One of the first things I did after leaving the Street was The Scarlet Pimpernel. Richard E. Grant had to bind me from head to foot. It was very pleasurable - and Richard ties a very expert knot!"
Raunchy her characters may be, but Denise speaks from that rare vantage point - a showbusiness marriage that has lasted. Nineteen years in her case.
She and composer Paul Sand have two children, Sam, 12 , and Dandy, 10, named after Dandy Nicholls, who played Warren Mitchell's missus, in Till Death Us Do Part. "I admired Dandy a lot," Denise explains.
She met Paul at an audition. He winked at her and that was it. "Love at first sight. I fell for him completely. Love means a lot to me. Our time together has been full of passion.
"We have huge rows, but there are wonderful moments as well." Paul loved her so much that he even went on the road with her while she was in a musical trio called Denise Black And The Kray Sisters. "Josie Lawrence and Kate McKenzie were in it with me. Paul wrote a lot of our stuff and occasionally played the piano.
"It wasn't easy for him as we did a lot of gigs on the alternative comedy circuit. One night we were playing to a feminist audience. Paul walked on and a group of women started shouting, 'All men are rapists.' We also played some pretty tough clubs. They hurled all sorts of things at us. Abuse mostly, but sometimes vegetables!"
Denise had no formal acting training. She did a degree in psychology at London University and then went around the world as a deckhand on luxury yachts - and rusting cargo ships.
Then she suddenly decided to become an actress. "It was at the age of 21 when I was in Gibraltar. I felt something in my trousers. Just there." She points at a shapely thigh. "I took them off and found a cockroach."
In the time it took to scrunch the insect underfoot she had taken stock of her situation. "I realised I had hit rock bottom.
"I was a cook on a cargo boat infested with cockroaches. The skipper was a Liverpudlian who had run off to sea because he was a bigamist and the net was closing in on him.
"I thought it was high time I did something else - so I came home and applied for a job I saw in The Stage. To my great surprise I got it. I ended up playing a cat in Sheffield."
THERE were times during the ups and downs of acting that she must have yearned for a reunion with the cockroach.
She was so poverty-stricken one year she had to make Christmas presents for her family because she couldn't afford to buy any.
Then, when she was working as a temp to see herself through another spell of unemployment, she got the call to play her namesake in Coronation Street. "I felt," she says, "like I'd won fastest finger first on Who Wants To Be A Millionaire."
In her three years as man-hungry Denise, she coped as well as any with the tidal wave of instant fame. "I was lucky because I was in my thirties. I'm not sure I'd have managed if I'd been 19.
"Keeping a bit of my life private was the hardest thing. When I was at home I'd think, 'I must draw the curtains, it's getting dark, people might be looking through the windows'."
She enjoyed the money, especially as she was bringing up two children, although now she sometimes wonders where it went. She reckons she must have eaten and drunk a lot of it - and now refers to the more rounded parts of her shapely figure as "the bank".
