WALFORD GAZETTE: So tell me a little bit about your back­ground. How did you become an actor?

LEILA BIRCH: I grew up in south-east London. I knew I wanted to act when I was five. That’s when I saw the Fred Astaire and Judy Garland films, and all of that. I started training when I was five or five-and-a-half and started to go to stage school on Saturdays. And then when I was nine, I did that full-time. So I didn’t go to a regular school. I went to a school where in the mornings we’d have ballet-tap, singing-dancing-acting, things like that. And then in the afternoon you’d do a limited amount of subjects, just enough to get you by—English, biology, things like that, but you didn’t take chemistry or science. It was really fun because we had dance studios that we’d go into at lunchtime and play music and dance around.

WG: Is anyone else in your family an actor?

LB: My great-aunt, who was one of the “Gaiety Girls,” 1919 to 1924, around that era. We have loads and loads of her theatre pro­grammes.

WG: While we’re on family, I was curious whether you have any Italian in your blood.

LB: My grandmother’s Italian and was born in Italy.

WG: Did that help when you went for the part of Teresa?

LB: I think maybe. I get taken for Jewish, Italian, Arab people, Spanish, all kinds of different things. And I think it’s funny because I’m as much Irish actually as I am Italian, but no one ever says I look Irish! I still see my grandmother. She was one of the evacuees during the war. She’s fan­tastic. And then on my other side, my grandfather and grandmother met in the Second World War. My grandfather’s a major and he’s very ‘jolly good,” all that kind of thing, very, very British. And she’s very, very Italian. And it’s great because I mean I see those grandparents like every week. On Sunday we go ‘round and have a four-course meal. The whole family gets together and it’s kind of very Italian that way. I’m very family orientated. I think it gives you a really good base, especially in the world of show business.

This course opened me up to a more adult way of working with drama. There were people from New York, Alabama, Los Angeles, Connecticut. There was a girl from France. She and I were the only Europeans. The course was really intensive, nine in the morning ‘till ten at night. It was really, really hard work.

WG: How did you get selected for that?

LB: Well, my mum knew some­one who said, “Your daughter should find out about these courses that go on at Yale, because they produced a lot of good actors.”

WG: What was your first big break?

LB:  Ah, I think one of the first things that I did that—I mean it was a small part, but it was the first thing that was real prime time. I did an episode of a series called Thief Takers for Carlton; I played a sexually abused teenage girl.

I then did two years of college, a whole lot of physical theatre and experimental theatre. In my third year of this performing arts thing, it was more about putting on plays. When I finished, I wrote to 190 agents and found one. I did a television production about a reject football team, and I played this Italian girl called Gina, who just came on and basically told some guy who was pretending to be an Italian so that he could play good football , “Oh, you can’t be an Italian.” He scores a great goal and then we walked into the sunset.

I then got an audition for EastEnders to be a baggage han­dler at an airport. The episode had to do with Cindy running away with David to Italy. As I walked to the lift the casting director said to me, “I’m going to persuade the director not to use you for this.” And I was like devastated... Then he said, “Because there’s an Italian family coming in into the show. Would a six-month contract scare you?” And I said, “No!” There was this massive gap—five or six weeks—in between going for that audition and then coming back again. Of course, every day’s slip­ping by and you’re going, “Oh, no. They just didn’t want me at all and they lied.”

They asked me to come back again, and I knew I was among the last five, including one of my friends from college. We had a chat and said, “Whichever one gets it takes the other one out, meal, as much champagne as they want.” So we’re down to the last five and we had to like read and everything and that was great. And then I got recalled back again, and I wasn’t sure whether it was just me or me and two others or me and three others. The lady who played Stella the lady who played my grandmother walked through, and I met Marc (Bannerman, aka Gianni) and Michael (Greco aka Beppe).

WG: They were in the same boat, basically?

LB: We were all going for the screen test. We all met and it was very nice. And then I had to do a scene where I was pretending to be Nigel’s girlfriend. And I’m think­ing, “Well, maybe they want me for the girlfriend, that maybe they don’t want me as Teresa.”

WG: Your mind plays tricks.

LB: I got worried and waited for hours until maybe seven at night, just waiting. So I was, “Why would they leave me hanging around so long?” And they were quite appreciative that I stayed. But, of course I’d stay. I wanted the job! And then I found out two days later that I’d got the job. Obviously I was ecstatic. I screamed on the phone to my agent!

WG: So once the family was set, did you bond with Mark and Michael?

LB: Very much so. You know, we bonded as a family, yeah. Well, not so much as siblings. Maybe at first, but recently I saw Marc and Carly [Hillman, who played her younger sister Nicky]. She did a gig somewhere she sings and me and Marc and one of my other friends went to see her. They all just ended up staying at my flat. It was fantastic, like a family reunion! When we were working with each other, we bonded in a completely different way than because there was almost like a kind of family edge to our rela­tionship with each other. I felt quite responsible for Carly.

WG: How old was she then?

LB: I think she was about 13 or 14, but she was playing a year or so younger than she actually was. I think my character was two years younger than my real age. I was 19 when I got the job.

LB:  Yeah. I think that kind of freaked her. She did go a couple of times. I remember being in the prison set, but it was all a bit too real, I think. Teresa was constantly escaping from who she was. And to be dealing with “My boyfriend’s in prison. No one’s asking me what I feel about this.” You know, she had no real friend to turn to. She had Robbie to a certain extent. She had a competitive thing with Sarah. Everyone else really who was close to her had left the square. And there wasn’t really anybody who she thought she could really open up to.

WG: You just mentioned Robbie. He really fancied Teresa, but she was only interested in him as a friend.

LB: Robbie had own problems really. I mean look at that family for a start, you know. You think ours is in big trouble. What about theirs? (Laughs)

WG: There was not really a lot of closeness between Louise and Teresa.

LB: There were scenes off-camera that we discussed, but at the end of the day it’s a soap, it’s fast-moving and you have to realise that. I liked it when I was in the restau­rant, where I was able to give a lot of comic looks.

WG: Is there any of Teresa in you?

LB: I don’t think I could be further away from Teresa. She wasn’t a baddie as such, but she was a bit of a minx, you know, and some­times that’s quite fun because it’s something that I would never do. So it’s almost like, getting to live out this strange lifestyle, like be a fly on the wall and look at how you could have been in an alter­nate reality. So I think that’s really fun about her and I quite miss her in certain ways actually. People have said, “Oh, would you go back to EastEnders?” And I said, “You know, I think it would be quite fun,” you know, because I would have to like refine my character. They didn’t kill us (the di Marcos) off, which is a nice thing.

WG: Has playing Teresa made it difficult getting other parts?

LB: When you’re in a soap, you get this high amount of recognition, but then when you leave sometimes they don’t want to touch you with a bargepole because the general public won’t necessarily believe you as another character yet. So you have to have this cooling-off period as such, which can take people ten years, three years, five years, it depends. I’ve managed to get quite a lot of theatre things.

WG: What are you working on next?