Coronation Street star opens up on ‘tragic’ teenage years and pregnancy with man twice her age
Unlike the no-nonsense Eileen she plays on Coronation Street, Sue Cleaver has revealed that she has a lot of insecurities and many stem from being taken advantage of when she was a teenager
“I was just searching and searching for someone to make me feel okay,” Sue says (
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On the cobbles of Coronation Street Eileen Grimshaw is known as a straight-talker who doesn’t suffer fools gladly. Whether she’s brawling in the street with Gail Platt or putting people in their place in the Rovers Return, it takes a brave person to cross her.
But as actress Sue Cleaver prepares to return to the Street after a summer on the theatre stage, she’s opened up about her hidden fears – revealing she used to be too terrified to even speak to her fans because of her own insecurities.
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“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,’” Sue confesses. “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.
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Sue plays the straight-talking Eileen on Corrie (
Image:
ITV)
“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 on I’m A Celebrity (
Image:
ITV)
With son Elliott Quinn (
Image:
Mike Marsland/WireImage)
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.
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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.”
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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.
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Sue’s candid new memoir (
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The actress was unlucky in love again when her first marriage ended in divorce in 2003, 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.”
