Hello and welcome to Women of Balls, where I, Katie Balls, speak to today's trailblazers.

My guest today was born in Cheshire, moved to Wales, age three.

She attended convent schools before heading to an Anglican school, where she broke every possible rule I could, in her words,

and then went to Cambridge,

studying law at first and then history. She had dreams of becoming an actor, so joined the

footlights, the renowned theatre club at the university, but left when a sketch was rejected. After

university, my guest struggled to get into acting, working first at the Arts Council and as a lecturer.

Her first proper role came at the age of 34 when she was cast in the ITV show Peak Practice.

Since then, she has starred in the NHS focus drama Getting On, which she also co-wrote, and played Terry in the thick of it, as well as the Invisible Woman, to name a few.

Speaking about her battle to get into the industry, she said, coming up to 30, things become clearer.

You've not yet necessarily got the experience to pull it off, but you suddenly think, I need to make a change.

Even if I'm a complete failure, it doesn't matter. Every daily

act or right is a day I'm 10 times happier. She plays a leading role in Afterlove, a film about

a woman uncovering the secret life of her late husband, which is out now. My guest today is

Joanna Scanlan. So Joanna, many thanks for coming on the podcast today. To begin, we ask,

would you describe yours as a happy childhood? I don't know whether a happy childhood is something

that anybody really experiences, or indeed what that phrase means. I think it is banded about a lot.

Childhood, the process of being born, getting bigger, having to kind of deal with

understanding the world as it is, is I think inevitably going to be a stretch. You know,

that's the nature of it, literally a stretch.

And I would say my own childhood was, if you want to call it happy, it would be associated with the things that all childhoods are associated with, which is being out in the countryside, being free, spending a lot of time with animals,

having a kind of rather beautiful. I mean, North Wales is the most beautiful place, and it is incredibly beautiful place to grow up. And I was certainly very happy in all those

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