Call The Midwife's Jennifer Kirby on turning into a vampire for new TV series
express.co.ukEvening Standard Theatre Awards. “I’m proudest of that part,” she says. “You can’t get more iconic than Elizabeth Bennet.”Persuaded to audition for the RSC, she landed plum gigs as Lady Percy in Henry IV Part I & II and Katherine in Henry V.“I was living a dream with the RSC.
I had great parts and I got to work with Anthony Sher [Prince Hal in Henry IV] who had long been a hero of mine.”It was also where the wry articular star met her other half, actor Robert Gilbert, last seen on TV’s Killing Eve.Other strong stage roles followed, including Sylvia in The Recruiting Officer at Salisbury Playhouse and her mesmerising performance as Josie, a gun-toting Teddy Girl in Teddy, a critically acclaimed 2015 play set around south London’s Elephant & Castle in the 1950s, at Southwark Playhouse. “It was such fun,” she says. “One of the reasons I got the Call The Midwife part was that a casting director saw me in that – everything is linked.”Jennifer was in New York, touring with the RSC, when she sent in her audition tapes, not expecting to get the part.She then spent “four joyful years” as ex-army nurse Valerie Dyer in the top-rated BBC drama, before leaving in 2020, and praises the show’s bold, often heart-rending storylines, which have included female genital mutilation and the thalidomide scandal.“People who don’t watch it think it’s cosy and twee but it deals with hard-hitting issues in a sensitive way and I’m very proud of that.“You also get weed on by babies.
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