It’s been 11 years since Holby City Hospital CEO Vanessa Lytton was forced to quit her job, departing under a dark cloud and leaving chaos in her wake! Now, actress Leslie Ash is reprising the role of the hard-nosed former nurse for a special episode of Casualty, in which her character is admitted to the ED as a patient.
“I was thinking that maybe it’s time to retire from acting,” reveals the 61-year-old star, as she joins Inside Soap for a chat about her Casualty cameo. “But my agent told me he’d received an offer for me to do Casualty, and that they were interested in bringing back the character of Vanessa. I thought, ‘Wow, that’s brilliant’. She was such an interesting character, and she caused a lot of problems at the hospital!”
Vanessa arrives in the ED with her husband Mike (played by ex-Corrie and Emmerdale star Bill Ward), and the nature of her injuries instantly raises suspicions for the medics treating her. However, as Leslie tells us, there’s always more to Vanessa than meets the eye…
“I had to remember how nasty she was!” laughs the star. “I played her quite cold, but one of her lines is, “I’m a better person now”, so I could manipulate her into a bit of a nicer person. The story is quite heart-tugging, there’s a lot of different emotions in there, a lot of crying.”
“There are some really touching moments between Vanessa and her husband, which is something new, because she was on her own before.”
Leslie did her Holby City stint at their Elstree base, so she enjoyed filming on the Casualty set in Cardiff for the first time – especially when she was reunited with an old pal…
“It was a lovely moment when I arrived and saw Derek Thompson [who plays Charlie],” she tells us. “I haven’t seen Derek since we were in [police drama] The Gentle Touch together – that was one of my very first jobs, and it was 40 years ago! So it was really lovely to work with Derek again, and Charlie recognises Vanessa straight away, too.”
After returning as Vanessa after such a long gap, there’s another former character Leslie would love to revisit…
“Deborah from Men Behaving Badly, although I think we’re all a bit old now!” she laughs. “We could do a reunion like they did with Friends, that would be lovely, reading through some of the old scenes that really made us laugh. I could hardly get through them when we were filming it, though – God knows what people must have thought when they were watching!”
- Don’t miss the full version of our chat with Leslie in the current issue of Inside Soap – it’s on sale now!
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