Kay Mellor

Kay Mellor OBE (née Daniel; born 11 May 1951) is an English actress, scriptwriter, and director best known for her work on several successful television drama series.

Early life[]

Kay Daniel was born in Leeds to a Catholic father, George, and a Jewish mother, Dinah.^[1] Kay has two – Philip (younger) and Robert (older). Robert died in the early 2010s. Mellor's mother Dinah divorced her father because of domestic violence. She threw him out when Mellor was two years old and after that raised her children as a single parent.^[2]

In 1967, Mellor become pregnant aged 16 and married the child's father, Anthony Mellor, who was 17. The couple have been together since and still reside in Leeds. They have two daughters, television producer Yvonne Francas (born 1967) and actress Gaynor Faye (born 1971)^[3] and four grandchildren.^[2] All three families are living in Leeds and are very close.^[3]

When Mellor told her mother about being pregnant, she made her daughter promise to go back to her education later, should she get the chance. Mellor did so when her children were at school age, passing her O-levels and A-levels. She went on to Bretton Hall College (now part of the University of Leeds) and graduated with a BA Hons degree in 1983.^[2][4]

Career[]

As a writer, she began working for Granada Television in the 1980s, writing for the soap opera Coronation Street. In 1989, Mellor also wrote many episodes for the popular Channel 4 soap Brookside.

She wrote for the anthology drama series Dramarama before co-creating the long-running children's drama Children's Ward with her Coronation Street colleague Paul Abbott in 1988. The series was awarded Best Children's Drama in the 1997 BAFTA Awards. She also created the soap opera Families which aired from 1990 until 1993 and wrote and starred in four series' of the family show Just Us (1990-1994). Since then she has written a host of highly acclaimed and popular television drama serials including: Band of Gold (1995); Playing the Field (1998) for BBC One; Fat Friends (2000); Between the Sheets (2003) and Strictly Confidential (2006) for ITV.

Commenting on the casting for Fat Friends, Mellor said she had wanted genuinely big people to play the parts, calling Ruth Jones and James Corden "the real McCoy". Mellor had seen Corden in a Tango advert and asked her casting director to find him for her because she thought he was perfect for the part.^[4]

In her parallel career as a television actress, Mellor has appeared in her own adaptation of Jane Eyre (1997) and in other series such as the comedy drama Stan the Man (2002), A Good Thief (2002) and Gifted (2003). On stage, Kay has acted in Three Girls in Blue and she wrote and starred in the one-woman show Queen at the West Yorkshire Playhouse.

In July 2006, another of her dramas aired on BBC One called The Chase. She wrote and directed the two-part drama A Passionate Woman which was based on her 1992 stage play and was broadcast on BBC One in April 2010. The play was inspired by her mother's experience of having had a passionate affair with a man while she was unhappily married to Mellor's father. Her mother had kept the affair a secret for more than thirty years before telling Mellor about it.^[4]

In 2012, she wrote another BBC drama The Syndicate. This returned for a second series in 2013, a third in 2015^[5] and a fourth in 2021 (for more details see below). In 2014, her BBC series In the Club was first broadcast followed by a second series in 2016. Mellor's drama series Love, Lies and Records ran on BBC One in November and December 2017, starring - amongst others - Rebecca Front and Ashley Jensen.^[6] Her ITV drama series Girlfriends, starring Zoë Wanamaker, Miranda Richardson and Phyllis Logan, premiered in January 2018.^[7]

The fourth series of Mellor's BBC One drama The Syndicate returned to screens in March 2021 with a cast including: Neil Morrissey (The Good Karma Hospital, Line of Duty), Katherine Rose Morley (Thirteen, Last Tango in Halifax), Kieran Urquhart (The North Water, Vera), Taj Atwal (In The Club, Line of Duty), Liberty Hobbs (Grey's Anatomy), Emily Head (The Inbetweeners, Emmerdale), Gaynor Faye (Emmerdale, Calendar Girls), Kym Marsh (Your Money and Your Life, Coronation Street), Katie McGlynn (Coronation Street, Waterloo Road), Mark Benton (Shakespeare & Hathaway, The Halcyon), Lorraine Bruce (The Syndicate, White Gold) and Joe Sugg (YouTube vlogger best known for Strictly Come Dancing) in his TV acting debut. Mellor is the creator, writer and director (episode 1, 2 and 6).

Kay was awarded the BAFTA Dennis Potter Award in 1997 for Outstanding Writing for Television.

Mellor was appointed Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) in the 2009 Birthday Honours^[8] and, in 2014, she was awarded the Writers Guild Award for Outstanding Contribution to Writing. In 2016, Mellor was made a Fellow of the Royal Television Society^[9] and, in February 2020, Mellor was awarded Broadcast's Special Recognition Award.

She was the subject of This Is Your Life in 2000 when she was surprised by Michael Aspel.^[10] She also appeared on the BBC's Desert Island Discs in 2017.^[11]

Outside of television, Mellor has written a number of feature films including Girls Night starring Julie Walters, Brenda Blethyn and Kris Kristorfferson which won the Audience Prize at the Sundance Film Festival in 1998. In 1999 she both wrote and directed the feature film Fanny and Elvis starring Ray Winstone which won the Audience Pririze at the Dinard British Film Festival and one off drama Some Kind of Life which was BAFTA nominated and won the Prix Niki Award.

In 2017, Mellor turned Fat Friends into a stage musical with Nick Lloyd Webber writing the music. Fat Friends The Musical toured the UK in 2018. Having had her appetite whet, Mellor turned her hand to a stage play adaptation of her 1990's hit TV series Band of Gold which toured the UK in 2019 / 20 before theatres went dark due to the Covid pandemic.

Solo writing[]

Mellor writes all of her own work but is also passionate about mentoring emerging talent. Through her TV production company Rollem Productions she actively works with new writers to develop their projects.

References[]

Sources[]

• Writer Kay Mellor talks about her long-term love affair with Leeds, yorkshire.greatbritishlife.co.uk, June 2013.

External links[]

• Kay Mellor at IMDb
• Kay Mellor's appearance on This Is Your Life
• Interview on BBC's Desert Island Discs