EastEnderss Tracy-Ann Oberman on life and her latest London project
She was vengeful Chrissie Watts in EastEnders, vexatious Auntie Val in Friday Night Dinner, and voluptuous Mrs Purchase in Toast Of London. Award-winning actress Tracy-Ann Oberman has sparkled in everything from unflinching crime dramas to twinkle-eyed farce.
But if her parents had had their way, she’d have honed her performance skills in an entirely different theatre – the courts of law. And 14million viewers would have been robbed of the memorable sight of her bumping off-screen husband Dirty Den with a cast-iron Scottie dog doorstop.
Known for her forceful views and no-nonsense attitude, Tracy-Ann tells me surprisingly that “I was a very shy child”. But that changed when her father took her and my sister to the cinema to see The Amazing Mr Blunden. “I was four and I loved it! I lost myself in that, it was so magical. I knew immediately that I wanted to do that, to be part of that.”
She stuck to her acting dream growing up, even though her parents reacted, “like all immigrant parents, saying, ‘Don’t be ridiculous’. They thought it was madness, like wanting to be an astronaut, and tried to push me into law as it was a paid profession.
“We used to watch Rumple Of The Bailey and my father would say, ‘See, a much safer option’…”
Oberman, 56, doesn’t do safe, however.
From tomorrow, the Royal Shakespeare Company veteran plays a female Shylock in The Merchant Of Venice 1936, which relocates the Bard’s romantic comedy to East London on the cusp of the Battle of Cable Street, recasting Antonio and Portia as fascist blackshirts.
The stage adaption – Tracy-Ann’s idea – mines her Jewish family history, a story so astonishing it merits a television drama in its own right.
Her Shylock is based on her great-grandmother Annie who fled to England “to escape the Russian pogroms,” she says. “Like a lot of East End women, she was as tough as nails. Annie saw her father nearly get beheaded.”
She fled her small Russian hometown near Mogilev, now in eastern Belarus, aged 14 during the murderous 1905 anti-Jewish pogroms, finding love on the boat to Liverpool and work in her aunt’s East End factory.
Matriarchs ran the Oberman clan largely because most of the men had perished in the Great War.
Tracy-Ann recalls her paternal great-great aunt, known as Sarah Portugal, who smoked a clay pipe and sported “a slash of red lipstick”, an aunt called Machine Gun Molly, and her “bubba” – grandmother – Faye who fought at Cable Street in Whitechapel when more than 100,000 protestors put paid to Sir Oswald Mosley’s dream of marching 5,000 British Union of Fascist supporters through largely Jewish communities.
The spirit of these formidable women fired Tracy-Ann’s fierce opposition to antisemitism in the Labour Party and left-wing acting circles.
Oberman, who is married with one daughter, was born in Brent, north west London, grew up in Stanmore and then “fulfilled my duty” to her parents by studying classics at Leeds University.
She went on to graduate in drama at Manchester and train to be an actor at the Central School of Speech & Drama. In 1993, she joined the RSC, which helped dispel her parents’ fears. Sadly, her father passed away before her EastEnders stardom.
“He died in my arms. I was in my 20s and had to drag him down the stairs and give him mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. It was like an episode of Casualty.”
As well as multiple TV parts, Tracy-Ann has appeared in more than 400 radio plays, and written several for Radio 4.
Her career highlights include standing on the Olivier stage opposite Kenneth Branagh, appearing with John Malkovich in Lisbon, and her first day on Doctor Who playing Yvonne Hartman.
“I’m a lifelong fan, a Whovian, so going on set and seeing a Dalek and a Cyberman was incredible. I was in heaven.”
Auditioning to play Chrissie Watts, she says, “I was the only person I hadn’t heard of on the audition list.”
But joining EastEnders was “like going to Hogwarts,” she laughs. “It was like entering another world. The sets are a third smaller than real life, so on outside location shoots the actors look tiny.”
Tracy-Ann played Chrissie – “the Bette Davis of Walford” – for two years, appearing in 138 of 142 episodes in year one, shooting up to 28 scenes a day.
She filmed part of the climatic “Witches-of-Walford” episode before her hair-raising ten-day honeymoon in Phucket, Thailand, when the 2004 Boxing Day tsunami struck. She and husband Rob overslept one morning and woke up to find the beach had gone. “It was like a nuclear bomb had gone off,” she recalls. The couple spent the rest of their honeymoon helping the survivors before she returned to “bash Den over the head with a doorstop…”
She laughs. “He kept getting his head stuck to the floor with fake blood.”
Although powered by strong convictions, an air of mischief is very much part of Tracy-Ann’s essence.
The blonde, brown-eyed actress is currently writing a one-hour radio play about Mae West and is learning lines for a film she can’t discuss. Her work ethic makes Noah look like Andy Capp.
How does she relax?
“Hard drugs,” she jokes. “I have 13 things on the go as well as trying to be a good mum, and a good wife and a good daughter. I’d like a write a novel. I just need to find time. You need such discipline…”
Oberman has considered a spin-off comedy career. “I did a stand-up course back in the day with my friend Simon Evans,” says. “I had to do stand-up five nights a week. I did three. I got laughs, but I found it too lonely, I prefer working with people.”
People like Toast Of London creator Matt Berry – “a genius,” she says.
Her favourite stand-ups include Joan Rivers, Larry David, Richard Pryor, Bill Hicks and Sarah Silverman. “Ricky Gervais can be brilliant, that Golden Globes speech was one of the greatest pieces of TV ever.
“David Baddiel makes me laugh, he has the turn of phrase.”
Paul Ritter’s death in 2021 put paid to hit Channel 4 comedy Friday Night Dinner. “Not only was he an incredible human being, he was also a fantastic actor,” she says.
“He filmed that and Chernobyl at the same time. He’d have his shirt off filming for hours and never complained. He was mesmerising, the beating heart of the company.”
The ever-surprising Oberman acquitted herself well on Celebrity Mastermind – specialist subject, the Imperial Roman Family. She’d caught the I, Claudius bug young. “I was the freak child reading Suetonius at eleven. I must have been a real laugh. But it was exciting and salacious, like EastEnders with togas.”
Tracy-Ann put her ‘Shylock with street-fights’ idea to director Brigid Lamour. It’s a bold move. Shakespeare’s 16th Century classic arguably paints the Jewish moneylender as a pitiful villain getting his comeuppance.
“It’s a really difficult play,” she says of the original. “Like Fagin, Shylock buys into the trope of mean, money-grabbing, untrustworthy Jews.”
But the nine-cast play subverts that trope.
The actress has encountered modern antisemitism. She was advised to change her “too-Jewish” surname by a drama teacher, and experienced vile online insults from far-Left activists after objecting to Mear One’s mural of Jewish bankers playing Monopoly on the backs of working people.
“Somehow I ended up being one of the few people standing up to antisemitism in Corbyn’s Labour Party,” she said. “I had family in the camps and the Warsaw ghetto.”
She ticks me off for a throw-away 2006 nose joke, although I assure her there was no hidden meaning.
To Tracy-Ann resetting Shylock as an anti-fascist heroine at the Battle of Cable Street “reminds people of what a hopeful moment that was, and how we are stronger together – instead of splitting communities up to compete in the oppression Olympics.”
Oberman is a “no bull” person – honest, loyal and direct. “What I say I mean,” she says. “Although I’m also very impatient and I ask a million questions.
“But finding my voice has made me feel fearless.”
- The Merchant of Venice 1936 is at Watford Palace Theatre, Feb 27-March 11
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