Julie Hesmondhalgh

Julie Claire Hesmondhalgh was born in Accrington, Lancashire, where she was involved in local amateur theatre and studied A-level Theatre Studies at Accrington and Rossendale College under Martin Cosgrif. Despite planning to go into social work, she won a grant to attend LAMDA, where she studied from 1988-91. After graduating she was part of the theatre company, Arts Threshold, and with her teacher and mentor Brian Astbury and a group of friends, built a theatre in a basement in Paddington.

This led to roles on television in, among other programs, The Bill (1984), The Dwelling Place (1994), Pat and Margaret (1994), and an episode of Dalziel and Pascoe (1996). She was spotted by the casting crew for Coronation Street (1960) while appearing in "Much Ado About Nothing" in the Royal Exchange theatre in Manchester. She played "Hayley" in Coronation Street (1960), the first trans-character in a UK soap, from 1998 to 2014, when she left, winning a National TV Award for her performance in her exit storyline, which she shared with her screen husband, David Neilson. The couple also won Best Actor and Actress at the Soap Awards that year, as well as Best Onscreen Partnership.

She returned to work extensively in theatre, radio and television, with roles in Russell T. Davies's Cucumber (2015), Happy Valley (2014) (series 2), Doctor Who (2005), Catastrophe (2015), Inside No. 9 (2014), The Trouble with Maggie Cole (2020), and The A Word (2016) (series 3). The BBC4 film, Black Roses: The Killing of Sophie Lancaster (2015), in which she reprised her stage role as the mother of a murdered teenager, won her a Best Performance in a Single Drama Award from the Royal Television Society. Her role as a rape survivor in series 3 of Broadchurch (2013) earned her a BAFTA nomination for Best Supporting Actress in 2018.

Hesmondhalgh lives in Manchester with her family and is a founding member of political theatre collective, Take Back. In 2019, her book, Working Diary, was published by Methuen.