The actor and activist Liz Carr is most widely known for her role in the BBC TV drama Silent Witness, playing forensic examiner Clarissa Mullery. On stage, she won an Olivier Award for her part in the National Theatre production of The Normal Heart, where she played a character based on Dr Linda Laubenstein, a pioneer in the treatment of AIDS and a wheelchair user. Liz was the first wheelchair user to play this role in the four decades since the play was premiered.
She studied law at university in Nottingham, and worked as a disability adviser and campaigner before turning to performance. She formed the sketch group Nasty Girls, and started working with Graeae, the disabled-led theatre company. She’s also performed stand-up and hosted the acclaimed BBC podcast Ouch!
Here’s what we learned from her Desert Island Discs...
1. She had strong ideas of her own about the role of Clarissa in Silent Witness
The part of Clarissa Mullery in Silent Witness brought Liz into millions of living rooms.
“I loved Clarissa from the minute I read the script - I got her,” recalls Liz, and she also knew how she wanted to portray Clarissa’s life when she wasn’t at work.
“I wanted Clarissa to have a stable relationship because what we see on TV usually is disabled people going through: ‘Will anybody love me because I'm disabled?’ That’s valid, don't get me wrong, but that's usually the same story we see. So, I wanted to show what I needed to see when I was growing up… I needed to represent that myself.”
“All the other main characters, Thomas, Nikki and Jack, they all have all kinds of weird relationships. I'm going to be the one that has the stable relationship.”
2. One of her discs reminds Liz of her parents making music – with mixed results
Liz wants to take the song Beautiful Dreamer to the island, in a version by Sheryl Crow, because it immediately connects her with her parents.
She recalls how her father’s family had big events where all the relatives would get together and everyone was expected to have a party piece to perform.
“So when my mum met my dad, she would go round and they'd have these big dos, and they said: ‘Pat! Pat! What do you sing?’ And she says, ‘No, really, I can't sing.’”
“And then it got to one point where she couldn't put it off anymore. So my dad said, ‘Look, let's go into the front room where the piano is and you just sing for me.’ So he started to play Beautiful Dreamer and she's like - [Liz pretends to be her mum singing in a croaky off-key voice] - ‘Beautiful dreamer...’”
“And when you hear the beautiful Sheryl Crow singing it, you'll realise how bad that was. And my dad apparently just closed the piano lid and stood up and said: ‘This will never be discussed again.’”
But that wasn’t the end of it.
“When my dad was dying four years ago now and he was unconscious and we didn't know if it was hours or days,” says Liz. “One day mum [said], ‘Oh, so Peter, I was just wondering, would you like me to sing Beautiful Dreamer?’ And from nowhere he just goes, ‘No, I don't!’”
3. She doesn’t want her disability to overshadow who she is as a person
Liz became a wheelchair user at the age of 11, after some years of serious illness: “I got really ill, a really bad bout of measles, a virus and six months later, I became really very ill.”
I had a gang of friends by then - I say gang and that suggests we were really cool - but we were like the odd bods from school
"I haven't grown since I was seven because I was on steroids - a really high dosage. I think there are six in a million with my condition, so it comes out of nowhere.”
“It’s a gradual process. My lower spine just collapsed because steroids are no good for your bones. They weaken your bones. All of those things meant that from 11 I became a wheelchair user.”
“That was really difficult because we all have such negativity around disability. I think you'll notice that I've not labelled the medical condition I've got. [It’s a] big conscious choice, because it becomes something that obsesses the media. That's all they want to know. Or the public.”
"If you put my name into Google - I'm not saying I've ever done that, but I have - the top questions will be ‘What's wrong with Liz Carr? What condition has Liz Carr got?’ And it distracts. It's not that interesting. Ask me the right questions and I'm a fairly interesting person.”
4. Liz sees close connections between her acting and her activism
“I think it's about absolutely getting attention, flamboyance, exhibitionism, getting in the press, having an audience,” says Liz. "Those skills massively cross over.”
Liz looks back to her 20s, when she became involved in protests to highlight how so much public transport was inaccessible to wheelchair users: “It was the old handcuffing ourselves to London buses, Westminster Bridge or wherever.”
“You're basically saying: ‘This is public transport. We're members of the public. We can't get on there.’”
“I'm either invisible - if you don't know me from the telly, I'm invisible as a disabled woman. Or if you do know me from the telly, then people want selfies and they're thrilled to meet me. I live a dual life. It's fascinating.”
5. Working in the theatre was a revelation
“I think partly I have done so many [different] things because I'm in an industry where they don't really know what to do with disabled people,” Liz says, so working on how to portray a single character in a full-length stage play was an important creative experience.
“When I did Silent Witness, basically you wheel on to set and away you go. There's no time to think about who you are... but in theatre you work through the character. You think about who they are, who they are to you, who you want to present them as.”
“And then I'm also a massive show off and exhibitionist!... The buzz, the high when you realise that you're communicating with people, and they're hearing you, and they're either finding you funny or they're touched or they're enlightened or they're entertained when you make that connection. I think that it's there's nothing like it.”
6. Liz was given her first power chair at 18 – and the experience led to mixed emotions
“When you think about what not having a power chair means, it shocks me and it was my life,” explains Liz.
“It means you can't get from A to B. You're sitting at one desk, but you want to go and talk to the girls at the back of the class. Or you want to go to the toilet or you just want to move? And that was because at that point you couldn't get a decent outdoor chair on the NHS. And the chair that they had couldn't get up for the slight incline that there was at my school. I'd break down on the incline and there's not a RAC for wheelchairs - they come out in weeks.”
“In the end I had a manual chair that I can't self-propel. I had a gang of friends by then - I say gang and that suggests we're really cool - we were like the odd bods from school. Really wonderful, wonderful friends. And they were horrified that I didn't have a wheelchair and we're all going off to university. So, unbeknownst to me, they were raising money for me, the entire school.“
“I turned up one day, and there's an assembly in the sixth form common room and my mum and dad turned up. And you're like: ‘Oh, God...’ And then out came a big card that's pretty much as big as me and they wheel in a chair. I was thrilled and mortified in equal measure and it was very confusing for me.”
“My friends, the whole school was doing this because of the injustice, but I now felt really different. I was the object of charity, but that's confusing. I'm confused and I feel different and I don't really want to feel that.”
“The local paper, the Wirral Globe, wanted to do the story and all they wanted was to talk about me and what was wrong with me. And all I wanted to do was to talk about what my friends had done and the whole school, which was amazing.”
7. When it comes to a dream role, she has two in mind
“The dream part doesn't yet exist because there's such a lack of imagination around disability,” says Liz. “Usually the things that we are cast in are autobiographical because they have happened. So, we don't have to imagine them. I would like to open a script and go, ‘Oh my God. This is amazing. This is better than I could think of. This is not something I've seen before.’”
“And of course,” she adds, “I do want to be a Bond villain. I say that at any opportunity!”
