By Sarah Crompton.
Samantha Womack is exactly where she wants to be – standing on a stage, surrounded by noise, activity, the roar of the crowd, she is the still centre of a frenetic world.
Pippa Grange, the psychologist who helped Gareth Southgate fashion a new kind of England, a different kind of football team, was the part she wanted to play.
“She is very calm and centred, very direct,” she says. “There’s no mania with her. I was looking for something calm, contemplative, the space I wanted to be in. I didn’t want anything too frantic.”
The role, in the National Theatre’s touring production of James Graham’s hugely successful and much-acclaimed Dear England, is of particular significance for Samantha, because it marks her return to work after having treatment for breast cancer and then taking 18 months away in the quiet of her home in Valencia, Spain.
“I was being quite cautious in terms of what I came back to,” she says. “I wanted to try to hold on to some of the presence I had found being away.”
Before taking on the part of Pippa, Samantha did her research, reading Grange’s books, listening to her podcasts, and found herself fascinated by a woman who was so instrumental to the change in thinking that Graham dramatizes so vividly.
“I think some of her sensibilities felt familiar to me. She left home relatively early, did a lot of sofa surfing,” Samantha says.
“There were some familiarities that mirrored my experiences. She takes herself away from her childhood, and of dealing with issues of addiction and family abandonment.
She talks about dealing with breast cancer. I thought this is interesting to me, because she is someone who understands boundaries and is clear about where they are.”
What Samantha hadn’t expected was how nurturing the actual experience of rehearsing and performing Dear England has become.
“There is such positivity in the room,” she says. “I wondered how I would fit in, because I’m 52 and these young men are my son’s age. I wondered how I would find my space. But they are such an incredible bunch of people and really inclusive.
“They talk so honestly about their relationship with football and how, for some of them, it becomes the way they relate to the more physically repressed members of their families.
“It becomes the first time their father held them, the first time they saw their grandfather cry. That has opened a doorway for all of us to sit together. I just love coming in to work every day.”
Despite a wide-ranging and extensive career, Samantha is still best known for her role in EastEnders, in which she starred as Ronnie Mitchell on and off for ten years from 2007.
Her own life, however, has as many plot twists as any soap opera. Her parents split up when she was three years old, and her family life became ‘quite precarious.’
She spent some time with her grandmother, who was a choreographer for Cunard, travelling the world on cruise ships with the Sheila Holt Dancers who performed for guests such as Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton.
“I was like Eloise, in the children’s books about a girl who lives in the Plaza Hotel,” she says. “My mum had raised me on Smash potato and baked beans, and suddenly I’m on the QE2 sitting under the seafood table, with this amazing food and a lavish lifestyle, but also music and people who were very expressive.
“l learnt my appreciation of music and musicals on those ships.”
After leaving school at 15, Samantha first found fame as Samantha Janus, who at the age of 19, represented Britain at Eurovision in 1991.
Her experiences at the hands of the tabloid press make her deeply sympathetic to Gareth Southgate and all he went through when he missed a penalty at Euro 1996.
“I remember the vilification of him because I was terrified of the press at that point. You couldn’t fight any story. You just had to allow this frenzied attack to continue.
“I find it extremely moving watching the re-enactment of that moment in Dear England, of this man who went through so much arriving back at a point in the universe where the trauma he has suffered means something and he can change things.”
Her own experiences as a young woman also make her deeply sympathetic to the burden of fame and expectation that footballers have placed on their shoulders, particularly in the age of social media.
“We watched footage of Marcus Rashford at 18, being compared to Ronaldo, and he says, really tellingly, that he is aware it can be taken away as easily as it was given.
“The enormity of that. You make a wrong decision. You play badly. To have success taken away at such a young age. I think of myself at 18. It’s such a complicated time anyway.”
Samantha’s fame in EastEnders was of a different league than anything she had experienced before.
“I was a household name before I joined, and I thought, how different can a soap be? But there’s a sense of ownership the public has about somebody who is in their living room four times a week. The distance between you and them is very close, so that took some getting used to.”
She loved playing Ronnie, whose storylines involving murder, attempted poisoning, and her final drowning in a hotel pool, became more and more sensational.
“I fought tooth and nail to try and keep it rooted somewhat in a sense of truth,” she says. “But of course that’s not the template. I’d say the stuff we did when we came in was really good. It was an extraordinary experience, but I am glad I left when I did.”
Before and after, EastEnders she has worked regularly on stage, often in musicals such as South Pacific and The Addams Family. She also played Tanya in Mount Pleasant on TV, and Taron Egerton’s mother in the first two Kingsman films.
That was until cancer intervened. At more or less the same time, in 2021, Samantha moved to a small town in a valley in Valencia.
“I went into survival mode,” she says. “I’d have chemotherapy at the Royal Marsden in London, and I’d get on a plane immediately to get back to the mountains. It wasn’t advised, but I needed the silence.
“Having been a woman in the spotlight for a long time, where my looks were constantly bandied around, as if that was my only sense of worth, that penetrates through.
“A lot of my sense of self was absolutely affiliated with what I looked like. Having breast cancer, going through operations and chemo, was a rebirth for me in some ways. I am still finding my wayback in, but I think you sit somewhere else.”
Now she has six rescue dogs and a quiet life. She has three children – a stepson who is 30 and a son, 24, and a daughter, 20, with her ex-husband Mark Womack.
The couple separated in 2018 but have an entirely friendly relationship and a blended family. She stays with him and his new partner in his home in Liverpool, while they spend time with her and her partner, the actor Oliver Farnsworth.
While on tour, however, she will be living in a camper van with at least three of her dogs. It suits her need for peace and quiet.
“I love being on tour,” she says. “But I like that sense of my own life.”
Tickets for Dear England (Tuesday 13 – Saturday 17 January 2026) are on sale at mayflower.org.uk or 02380 711811.
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