Elisabeth Sladen: The Autobiography

‘Brian,’ I said, ‘the baby’s coming.’

He leapt out of bed as if I’d put 10,000 volts through him and ran out the door. Wow, I thought, he’s practised this! Ten minutes later I was sitting dressed on the bed, packed overnight bag next to me, and I thought, Where the hell is he?

‘Brian!’

‘Yes?’ a voice came back from the bathroom.

‘What are you doing?’

He said, ‘I’m washing my hair – I’m recording tomorrow.’

The bastard!

I’m sitting there with my legs crossed and he’s primping and preening.

‘Look, I don’t know how long we’ll be there,’ he told me. ‘I might not have time to come home again.’

I was furious he was even contemplating work but that’s the actor’s lot. You’re at the whim of the industry. Let a director down and your career might never recover. Even so …

We got to hospital and things went so slowly that he was still there on the Sunday morning. Barely able to stand from exhaustion, he said, ‘I’m sorry, I’ve got to go.’

I wasn’t happy but I understood.

When Brian came rushing back at eleven o’clock at night the only change was that I was now in agony. I didn’t want any painkillers but by the Monday morning they recommended an epidural. My God, the relief was instant! Then I heard a doctor say, ‘We need to monitor this because the baby’s in a bit of distress.’

Suddenly I was on full alert.

‘Hang on, distress? I don’t mind a bit of pain but we’re not risking my baby!’

After all my years on Who I should have realised you can’t tell a doctor anything.

‘We’ll leave it a couple of hours then help you push.’

‘Push?’ I said. ‘I can’t feel anything below my neck.’

Talk turned to forceps.

I said, ‘No way. The baby’s in distress, I want the baby out now!’

‘Look, if you have a caesarean, you will know about it tomorrow,’ a nurse told me.

‘If I don’t have a caesarean, you will know about it tomorrow!’ I insisted.

So about ten to three on the afternoon of 25 February 1985, Sadie Isabel Amy Miller was born. Eight pounds, but the size of a donkey, and beautiful – absolutely beautiful! I’d never been so happy in my life.

*   *   *

It should be obvious by now that Brian and I aren’t planners. I hadn’t planned to have a baby at thirty-nine – but then I hadn’t not planned to either. I guess we both assumed it would happen one day, although neither of us appreciated that time might have been running out. Consequently I never planned to give up work – or to not give up work. When I looked in the diary at a booking for the hit cop show at the time, Dempsey & Makepeace, it didn’t occur to me to cancel.

It was a mistake. I didn’t enjoy being away from Sadie, and trying to work while you’re still expressing milk simply doesn’t work. I nearly knocked it all on the head but then I got a call from my agent. Alice was up and running again. Every instinct told me to pass but it was Barry, bless him; I didn’t realise how worried he’d been about me either. ‘I hadn’t heard anything and she was so late arriving …’ He admitted he’d feared the worst.

It’s hard being a mother in a city with no family around to lend a hand. Mandy helped out a lot but because Brian was on Alice as well, we had to hire a nanny. She was nice but it wasn’t like leaving Sadie with family.

Still, having the nanny gave me a ridiculous amount of confidence. Before I knew it, I’d said ‘yes’ to that year’s Chicago convention on the proviso that the nanny had to come as well.

‘No problem.’

OK, I thought, Have baby, will travel.

Three days before we left, the nanny announced she was pregnant (she must have known before we’d booked the tickets). We got to Chicago and she had a lie down! Pregnancy does some strange things but I was so annoyed. At nine months Sadie was crawling all over the place. I remember getting up one morning, Brian was doing a phone interview – and our daughter was trying to chew through the cables! That’s it, I thought. No more juggling, something’s got to give.

The final straw came a few months later. Lovely Tim Stern, who’d played my husband in Robin Hood at Bristol, introduced me to his wife, Paddy. She was casting director on Emmerdale and she said, ‘We’ve got the perfect part for you.’

At that moment I understood exactly what Oscar Wilde meant about resisting everything but temptation. The habits of twenty years as a freelance actor are hard to give up. So while every fibre in my body was screaming, No, I heard myself say, ‘Tell me more …’

I went up for a meet and greet with the producers and afterwards Paddy came over, scratching her head.

‘Lis, why did you just talk yourself out of that job?’