Sarah Lancashire

Award-winning actress Sarah Lancashire won the hearts of many as the dim, but lovable barmaid Raquel in Coronation Street — she’s been our screen for over 30 years. Sarah went on to secure roles in Where the Heart Is, Clocking Off and Seeing Red.

In the summer of 2000, she signed a two-year £1.3m contract with ITV making her the UK’s highest paid television actress at the time.

Her first role under the new contract was in six-part drama The Glass opposite John Thaw before starring in the two-part psychological drama The Cry. She has narrated the BBC One series Lark Rise To Candleford, played the mother of a murder victim in the BBC drama Five Daughters and the Head of Ladies-wear Miss Audrey in The Paradise. She is also one of the lead cast members in BBC drama, Last Tango in Halifax and has won critical acclaim for her role as police sergeant Catherine Cawood in Happy Valley.

Educated at Oldham Hulme Grammar School, Sarah started battling depression at the age of 17. She was offered a place at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama and graduated in 1986. Her first job was with the Manchester Library Theatre Company. Because she had big gaps between work, Sarah worked as a drama teacher at Salford University to support herself.

When she was 22, she married music lecturer Gary Hargreaves, her first serious boyfriend; they had been dating for four years. They had a son called Thomas in 1987 before another arrived in 1989. They separated in 1995 before divorcing. Then in 2001, Sarah married TV producer and executive Peter Salmon with whom she has a son Joseph, born in 2003.

She got her big break when she landed the role of Linda in the West End production of Blood Brothers at the Albery Theatre in 1990. In 1991, two weeks after her run in Blood Brothers came to an end, she landed the part of Raquel Wolstenholme, a colleague of Norman ‘Curly’ Watts, played by Kevin Kennedy, in Coronation Street. She proved to be an instant hit with fans of the soap, even more so when Raquel and Curly married, and starred in the spin-off Coronation Street episode, the Cruise, which focused on their honeymoon. When Sarah left the soap in 1996 her final scenes attracted 20 million viewers.

After Corrie, Sarah went on to star as district nurse Ruth Goddard in ITV drama Where the Heart Is before making a guest appearance on the dark comedy series Murder Most Horrid. After she left Where the Heart Is in 1999, she returned to Corrie for one episode which just starred her and Kevin Kennedy, in which Raquel asks Curly for a divorce.

In 2017 she was awarded an OBE for services to drama. She received the accolade from the Duke of Cambridge at Buckingham Palace.

1. “I wish my father had been alive. I think at times like this, really, one tends to focus on parents and my father would have been the proudest man in the world. It’s very difficult because you are in these most spectacular surroundings and you are trying desperately to take it all in. It’s wonderful.”

Born in Oldham, Greater Manchester in 1964 Sarah has three brothers; one her twin, one older, one younger. Her father Geoffrey was a television scriptwriter for Coronation Street and The Cuckoo Waltz and her mother Hilda was his personal assistant.