Kathy Burke (2025) A Mind of My Own

Most of us know who Kathy Burke is. She’s kinda famous. Famous enough to have a major publisher publish her autobiography, A Mind of My Own.

I like her because she always comes across as that rarest of breeds, a working-class actress made good. Working-class actor if we’re being politically correct. I loved her retort to Helena Bonham Carter when she opined that there weren’t enough roles for her because she was too pretty. Let me remind you. Aristocratic, Bonham Carter is the British equivalent of Winona Ryder. Period drama, contemporary drama, every fucking drama, she was on the big screen or on the telly. For the tens of thousands of drama students and graduates her face and constant presence was a reminder some people were blessed, most were left behind, making do with bar work, like Cathy Burke, for cash-in- hand, or waitressing or…well, you know the score, not acting.

‘As a lifelong reminder of the non-pretty working classes I’d like to say to Helena Bonham Carter, shut up you stupid cunt.’

Absolutely.

 But here’s the duality. Burke is a success too. She found work. She found fame. She won a best actress award at Cannes for Nil by Mouth, directed by Garry Oldman. In her almost thirty years working and not working in the acting game she knows most of the good and not so good. She could even afford to buy a house in London. Not in Islington where she was brought up by an alcoholic Irish father and two older brothers, but close by. That’s a shorthand way of declaring I’m a millionaire.

She declared herself no longer an actress. She puts it rather well, in simplified form that even a black Hack driver would understand. As you’d expect from someone that’s written and directed plays. The analogy is with football. Actors are footballers out on the park. Directors are their coaches. She’s more of a writer-director now. She’s lost her passion for being out there. For being a face. For being semi-famous.

A Mind of My Own is just that. Not a kiss and tell. She does the early Irish, motherless, scamp who loved life and life loved her back quite well. And having a one-sided love affair in later life which almost broke her. But she doesn’t name the lover. Nor should she. Unless it was Gary Oldman or such ilk, headline grabbers like Lulu’s admission she’d an affair with David Bowie, we don’t really care. Nor would she expect us to.

Books like films and stage plays are entertainment and she’s a fine enough writer to have the reader rooting for her, but mostly those that pick up the book, already are. There’s no knockout blow.

Rather, observation and musings about her observations, which can often turn into a panegyric of why I became the best (or even the best of the worst. Johnny Rotten really was rotten because he couldn’t divorce his constructed character from whatever he thought he was, which was brilliant and original—he wasn’t,  and isn’t—although for a brief moment in time, he might have been fine before he became a right-wing bigot).

Kathy Burke isn’t pretty isn’t a headline. Her feud with Bonham Carter was more of a headline grabber than any of her acting awards. That’s the nature of the beast. Kathy Burke is fine. Her autobiography is fine too, rather than riveting. I’m guessing she’s putting this down as the last chapter in her book.  

https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B0CVBVVGD6