Silent Witness at 30 - Revisiting our interview with Amanda Burton: 'I don't suffer fools gladly'

This article was first published in Radio Times magazine in February 1996, when the first ever run of Silent Witness was released.

I am no prude but what, I ask, is a nice, discreet, private, shy, wary actress doing in this film where we see energetic alfresco lovemaking within the first few minutes? It is a far cry from the rural pleasantries of Peak Practice. I play mum and pour the tea - we are in a cosy Chelsea Harbour hotel - while she contemplates her answer.

"Mmmm," she says. "This is the first time I’ve been involved in a programme that has nudity and perhaps more lovemaking than usual, and I had to think long and hard about it. Brookside [in which she made her name as the glamorous, twice-married accountant Heather Haversham] was hard hitting, but physically more than sexually. And the sex in Peak Practice was fairly dainty, I agree. But I feel all right about Silent Witness. It’s the style of the show."

In it she plays forensic pathologist Dr Sam Ryan, a Belfast born single woman of 37, living and working in Cambridge where her mother moved after her husband, who was in the RUC, was blown up in a booby-trapped car when Sam was 13.

In the first episode a seven-year-old girl (whose mother and stepfather do the cavorting) is found drowned in a local river. Sam investigates and suspects a history of child abuse, especially when she discovers the stepfather was previously the partner of a woman in prison for murdering her child. "I find the child abuse shocking and reel from that far more than the nudity and sex. It is stunningly hard to come to terms with the fact that people can abuse and murder children like that."

She speaks softly, with an occasional Londonderry lilt – she was brought up there, the youngest of four daughters of a headmaster. Her sisters became nurses or teachers, and she seems to have a certain prim cautiousness within her, unusual for an actress, as well as a toughness behind the porcelain prettiness – a more normal attribute.

Perhaps I am mistaken. There is a flamboyant statement – not to mention antisocial foolhardiness – in her choice of a Cherokee Jeep as her London runabout. "There’s nothing like a bad driver behind a four-wheel drive," she agrees. "But I think I’m good and I love driving."

She explains, several times, how "private" she is – one of those cliched paradoxes often noticeable in those who disport themselves for a living. "Yes, it’s a huge contradiction," she admits. "I don’t know why I was drawn to acting, although from about six I loved dancing and would shut myself away for hours, making up ballets, performing on my own with a record player.

"I see my own children (two daughters – Phoebe and Brid – with her husband, photographer Sven Amstein) doing it now. I find it therapeutic to go to Sven’s studio and dance now and again. At school I found it fun making people laugh. I was good at it and used to divert a lot of boring classes. Then, at 13, 1 became involved in plays. I was a complete home bird and the thought of being away from the house after school to attend rehearsals terrified me. But I loved the excitement of it. It was probably massive showing off.

"I still find doing ‘takes’ incredibly intoxicating. There’s such a thrill when everyone is concentrating on a scene. It’s nothing to do with people looking at me - we’re so against vanity aren’t we? We’re not allowed to pat ourselves on the back these days. You have to turn round a few months later and ask in a small voice, 'Was that all right?'

"I always worry and am anxious. I don’t feel I want to please people. If something is good I’ll allow myself to be pleased. On television you don’t have that awful thing, ‘control’, because you never know how it’s going to come out in the editing, but I rather like the overall shape being controlled by the director and editor. I trust them. You have to."

There are those who say there are too many police or medical dramas on television, and Silent Witness combines both genres. "But it’s different because Sam is a pathologist, dealing with what happens after the event. Pathologists are doing a jigsaw puzzle, which is very different to treating a patient with high blood pressure in a country practice.

"I agree, though, there is a fair obsession with medical and police matters in this country. Perhaps they’re the things we most worry about politically and stories about life and death provide good drama. But we all have the power to turn off the television and different programmes appeal for various reasons – a favourite actor, good locations. I rarely watch television, but there are some wonderful programmes."

After studying drama at Manchester Polytechnic, she worked for several years in the theatre before being cast in Brookside in 1982. She played Heather for four years. "I left because I like change and to see what happens when you give yourself space to do something different. I felt I’d done as much as I could with Heather before she degenerated into something silly.

"Script writers can have you doing rather peculiar things when you’ve been playing a particular character for too long. It’s best to go when people still like you. But I had nothing to go to, which was a bit foolhardy. You could call it confidence, or wildness. I don’t think I’ve ever stood still for long."

It coincided with the break-up of her first marriage, at 20, to a fellow student and stage director, Jonathan Hartley. "It’s life. Things happen. Things don’t happen," she explains. She had met Sven when he photographed her on set and moved to London with him. After working in Boon, she hit a lean period in her career.

"I had a year of staring out the window. The parts weren’t there and interviews didn’t happen. It was horrible, but in retrospect probably quite good for me. I pulled in my horns. For a while, just before Peak Practice, I thought of giving up acting. I hadn’t quite decided what to do, but I am very resourceful and could turn my hands to all sorts of things - cooking, making collages, baking bread in the south of France. It wouldn’t have worried me. I’m not rigid in the way I think of my life."

Nevertheless, she enjoyed her three years as Dr Beth Glover in the medical series set in Derbyshire. For years she scorned the idea that actors "become" the parts they play. "I’d never thought I carried Beth home with me until I had an extraordinary conversation with someone – I’m not telling you who – last summer and realised I’d probably kept hold of her.

"I’ve always been fascinated with medicine, and there’s a danger in acting a doctor that you become worthy and start believing you’re a saviour, which is very condescending and presumptuous – a dangerous road to go down. I recognised my own personality had changed. Beth – I love her - was a very easy character to have clinging round me, and I didn’t realise it. I put a lot of things in my life into hers and vice versa.

"But I don’t take Sam Ryan home because she’s such a dark person. This probably sounds absolute nonsense, but when I’m dressing for the part I feel her around me, and it’s a very kind of theatrical experience. I take on the mantel of this character when I go into the dressing room and take her off at the end of the day. You’re going to think I’m insane." She laughs tactfully and I assure her that is not the case.

Filming Silent Witness is "challenging in the true sense," she adds. "Time is always against you. There are smaller budgets and longer hours, so it’s like pushing the donkey up a bigger hill. I think we all get on in the cast. There’s an interesting fusion of people, not necessarily those you’d choose to be in the same room as. It’s an interesting mix which helps very much with the characterisation on screen."

There is tension in the films between her and police superintendent Harriet Farmer, played by Clare Higgins, who is unimpressed by her persistent meddling in cases that have been ‘solved’. "It isn’t cosy, like being in the theatre with a nice green room and comfy sofas. We’re all rather different people, but we get on."

Is there bitchiness? She pauses. "Is it bitchiness, or a highly tuned competitiveness which comes out in an ugly way sometimes and we label 'bitchy'? Competitiveness can be very positive if it’s well channelled. There’s also an anger that you have for yourself if you don’t get something right. I find it in myself. I’m becoming quieter and quieter in my working day.

"When I you’re there from 6:30 in the morning until nine at night, you have to be fairly quiet if you’re going to pull off a good performance during the 15th take of a car scene at eight o’clock in the evening. I don’t like expending energy on endless conversations, so I’ve gone into myself a lot. Does that make me difficult? You’ll have to ask other people. I don’t think so, but I don’t suffer fools gladly and take no prisoners."

I wonder if such a punishing schedule requires sacrifices as a mother. "No, it all works. We have a photographer/acting environment and since they were tiny the children have been used to Sven and I rushing off to do things. They go to a good school, have a capable, loving nanny and Sven is usually there for breakfast if I’m not. We work in tandem."

Next year she will be 40. "Why should I worry about that? We should be proud of our ages and pat ourselves on the back that we have got so far in such a stressful and frightening world. I’m afraid of the future, of where things will go. Big things. I don’t just mean on our little island, but the world as a whole. What is going to happen?"

In her own future she’d like to make films and play a character from a different age – "a woman pioneer. There are extraordinary stories of ladies who went to Africa. I can see why they wanted to shock the chattering classes. It must have been such a claustrophobic life if you had something to say, rather than just look pretty, provide meals and die quietly in your forties. It is such a plaintive cry, but it’s still hard for a woman to do many things, even as an actress.

"Not many have the main part in a series. Most roles are token – wife, girlfriend, mother, sister, daughter – a feed to the male peacock. I’d love to be a man for a while and see how different it is when you kick ass."

We finish our tea and walk thoughtfully into the night.

Silent Witness seasons 1-28 are available to stream now on BBC iPlayer.

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