The actor remembered her time with the maverick singer as toxic. But finding his love letters made her see things differently – and propelled her to make a drama of their time together
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.
