Amanda Mealing strides into the BBC’s Elstree Studios, a picture of health and radiance. Her skin glows, she looks relaxed and informal in grey sweat pants and a wraparound top, her auburn curls caught up under a beret and a pair of tortoiseshell glasses perched jauntily on the end of her nose. There is something irrepressible and youthful about her; it is difficult to believe that she’s a 40-year-old mother of two.
Yet there is one telltale sign that the actress, best known for her role as Connie Beauchamp, the ruthless medical director in BBC’s hospital drama Holby City, hasn’t always been so vibrant; just below her rose-coloured T-shirt, a powder-pink scar curls its way up her right breast; a reminder of her battle with breast cancer – which, so far, she is winning – and a mastectomy that she underwent five years ago.
There have also been no shortage of emotional challenges in Mealing’s life: when she was 18, her elder brother died after experimenting with heroin. On top of that, she is adopted, something she is only coming to terms with thanks to her charity work in Sierra Leone for Save the Children, a project she has signed up to for three years. Not that these experiences appear to have spoilt her appetite for work. She has always been something of a workaholic, an ethic that started at an early age. Her first job, at 6, was appearing in a Julie Andrews’s BBC special. Her parents then sent her to the Italia Conti Academy and she’s never been out of work since, appearing in Grange Hill, working with Alan Bleasdale in the Channel 4 drama series GBH, then Jake’s Progress in 1995, as well as being cast in Four Weddings and a Funeral.
Mealing has recently returned from making a documentary in Sierra Leone about Kroo Bay, a slum built on the rubbish discarded by Freetown. “It’s the worst place in the world you could grow up as child,” says Mealing. “One child in four will die before they reach five years old.” It was a moving experience for Mealing, not least because it’s where her biological father came from. “He is half Sierra Leonean. While I was there, it was something I was very aware of and I was curious to finish that last chapter.”
That last chapter began eight years ago when her eldest son, Milo, was born. “Having children suddenly made me want to trace my parents,” says Mealing, the youngest of four children, two sisters and an elder brother, and the only adopted member of her family. “I’d always been curious, but I didn’t want to upset my parents by looking for them. I wanted to make sure they understood that they were my parents, and nothing would ever change that.”
She always had a feeling she didn’t fit in
Although her parents were always honest about her adoption and she was, she says, part of a strong, loving family, there was always a yearning, a feeling that she didn’t quite fit in. “I looked so different, I used to scan people. I do it now. I even did it when I went to Sierra Leone.” Unconsciously she was searching for the physical connections and sense of belonging that most of us take for granted. By the time Milo came along, that scanning was to hard to ignore. “I needed an answer. Also I wanted Milo to know his heritage.”
Mealing’s journey took her to New York, where she finally discovered her biological mother. She was a young model for Biba in London when she met Mealing’s father, a poet and activist. “It would have been the Swinging Sixties when they met,” she says. “I don’t have much information, but I know she never really had a relationship with him and didn’t want to.” She gets on well with her biological mother and takes the children to visit her in New York. She also discovered that she has a sister, who is one year younger, living in England, and with whom she is now close. “She watched me grow up on TV and didn’t know I was her sister until she was about 16. Everyone would say, ‘You look like that girl on TV’.”
When they first met with their respective husbands (Mealing’s husband Richard is a screenwriter), they couldn’t believe the similarities between the sisters. “We talk the same, walk the same, even our actions are the same.”
One sadness for Mealing is the discovery that her biological father died some time ago. “There’s so much I can’t ask him that I’d like to. But the Save the Children project is my way of reconnecting with my roots and acknowledging him,” she says.
Mealing is no stranger to loss; when she was 18, her older brother Stephen died after taking heroin. “He was 14 years older than me, but we were incredibly close,” she says. Stephen was living near the family home in Dulwich, South-London. He was a traveller and, as Mealing says, a “free spirit”. Although she believed he had taken heroin more than once, he wasn’t an addict. “I think he had dabbled in drugs as a teenager. But it was just an accident. It was a real tragedy for everyone and, yes, it did influence me. It reminded me that life can be short and I thought there’s no point sitting around/ Go out and live each day.”
Very little, you sense, has managed to dent her innately optimistic outlook and lively nature. Her petite pretty features are in a constant state of mobility; sentences and anecdotes are embellished with a flourish of arms and underlined with snorts of self-deprecating laughter. Yet there is also an iron will and stubbornness, evident when she describes her struggle with breast cancer.
She first discovered a small lump in her breast while pregnant with her second son, Otis, now 5. “I thought, ‘Oh, it’s mastitis and they’d think I was an hysterical pregnant woman if I told them.” Then, within hours of Otis’s birth, she was breast-feeding and noticed the lump was much bigger. “It had grown into a massive, really dense lump. That has got to be the worst moment of all. Within 24 hours of giving birth, they were saying: ‘We’re going to do everything we can to fight this,’ which means, ‘Basically, you’re going to die.’ I was allowed to breast-feed only for a week and then I had a mastectomy.
“I was furious with the cancer,” she says, her voiced clipped and emphatic. “That anger made me more determined that I would do everything I had to do, but no more. I would not surrender. I had a newborn that needed me so I had extra purpose.” She refused to weaken even in the face of a gruelling nine-month course of chemotherapy. “I wouldn’t give in. I had the real hardcore chemo, a bright pink liquid that they inject into your arm.”After the chemo, she opted for reconstruction, an arduous operation that involved grafting flesh from the stomach on to the breast area.
“I was quite young and I wanted to feel confident again wearing vest tops. It really helped to close that chapter of my life.” Although complete closure only truly arrived last August when the doctors gave her the five-year all clear. “When he drew a line through my papers with a big red marker and said, ‘Right, you’re discharged’, I just sobbed from the bottom of my soul because I thought, ‘It’s over’, that feeling of hand-to-hand combat. It was such an amazing moment.”
The people-pleaser with in-built toughness
For the first time in years, Mealing’s life is relatively stress-free. She adores being a mother and, when she’s not on set, lives an idyllic life on her sprawling Lincolnshire farm. During the week her husband Richard looks after their two sons while she plays Connie in Holby City, a role she is just as passionate about after four years. “I have fun striding down corridors barking at people. I think it’s because I’m not like her that I love her so much. I’m a people-pleaser.”
She might sometimes seek approval but she has an ability to take the positive from the bleakest situations. “If you don’t learn from that and realise all we have is the here and now, then that really is the greater tragedy,” she says. With that she strides off as steely and determined, I can’t help thinking, as Connie Beauchamp. Maybe she’s not so different after all.
I think this is a lovely interview, I never knew that she was adopted
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