news ‘I don’t like to dwell on the dark side’: Jane Horrocks on life on her own, family and first love, Ian Dury | Jane Horrocks

Jane Horrocks is a tiny woman surrounded by vastness. There is the vastness of her Regency flat, with its towering ceilings and huge, open spaces. And then there’s the far

greater vastness of the Channel across the road. We are sitting in her belvedere on a freakishly hot winter’s day, taking in the sea. Horrocks is barely a speck on her own

landscape. And this is how she likes it. “Any issues I have are minor compared with what you see there. It’s so elemental. What am I in all this? Tiny. My little issues are

tiny.”Horrocks is wearing black trousers, black boots and an orange velveteen sweatshirt perfectly coordinated with her hair. “It would be totally grey now if I left it,” she

says. Horrocks is a girlish 58. In her 20s she was a girlish twentysomething. And on it went through the decades, though the reality was a little more complex. Now she’s at a new

stage in life – living by herself in Brighton since May, after the 21-year relationship with the father of her two grownup children, the TV writer Nick Vivian, finished in 2017;

after the recent end of a relationship with the actor Danny Webb; and after the death of her mother last year.From here, Horrocks has been looking back on her early adulthood, and

the result is a Radio 4 drama about her combustible relationship with the singer-songwriter, actor and maverick extraordinaire Ian Dury.‘It was my first real relationship’ …

Horrocks with Ian Dury in Greece in 1987.In 1986, she and Dury were cast in Road, Jim Cartwright’s then new (now classic) play about life in a northern community eviscerated by

Thatcherite politics. Horrocks was 23 and just starting out. Dury was 44, had enjoyed belated success as a pop star with hits such as Hit Me With Your Rhythm Stick and What a

Waste, and was re-inventing himself as an actor. Horrocks was an innocent, Dury was notoriously scary. “It was my first real relationship,” she says. And your first love?

“Yes.”Horrocks offers me a cup of tea. “I’ve not got ordinary milk, just almond milk. Is that too hideous?” That’s fine, I say. She heads off to the fridge. “ Do you

mind if I eat a little bit of my shepherd’s pie?” she asks ever so politely. She’s starving after an early morning swim in the sea. She pauses. “But then I’m not offering

you any shepherd’s pie,” she says anxiously. “I’ve only got one piece left. D’you want some hummus?”No thanks, I say.Her relationship with Dury lasted a tumultuous

year; their friendship until he died in 2000. Horrocks says she had remembered the relationship as “toxic”. At times she was petrified of Dury (he broke down her glass door