If you change with every job people can't say 'Ooh stick to what you know' because
"If you change with every job, people can't say 'Ooh, stick to what you know', because they don't know what you know." The only pigeon- hole anyone is going to fit Horrocks into is one with her name on it.Macbeth - Greenwich Theatre, 0181-853 3800, till 28 Oct; then touring to Norwich, Malvern, Glasgow, Nottingham, Chichester and Richmond from 1 Nov (0171-434 9757 for information).. WHAT'S in a name? What's in my name? Mother rang up the other night, and I couldn't work out why. You don't ring from Canada just for a spot of how's-your-father Or, as it turned out, that's exactly what you do do. I don't want to waste my time thinking I may get Miranda in Twelfth Night eventually."At 31, her keenness to chop and change shows no sign of abating: "You've got to keep trying different things because that's the only way to learn," she explains. "I don't think Ralph Fiennes and Imogen Stubbs were too happy. I think they were a bit surprised that of all the people in our year it was the girl from Rawtenstall [pron Rottenstall] who got into the RSC - I think they wondered why they'd been to Oxford. But then they both went there later on and did loads better than I did."Horrocks's short time at the RSC was nowhere near as productive as the career she subsequently fashioned for herself "There's a system there where you work your way up.
I left the salon with the album cover over my head."Her exit from drama school a few years later was rather more glorious. Jane Horrocks walked straight out of Rada into a plum berth at the RSC She must have been deeply hated by her peer group. "I went to get my hair done in a curly perm like Barbra's," she remembers, tenderly. "I took the album cover and said, 'I want my hair like that.' They told me it wouldn't come out that way, because her hair was much longer than mine, but I said, 'No, it'll definitely look like hers.' When they'd finished I looked about 90, the curls were lovely and tight.
Then, at the impressionable age of 15, she saw Barbra Streisand in A Star Is Born and thought, "Oh, I want to do that."Her Streisand fixation quickly reached obsessive levels. Her performing career began as a teenage Mike Yarwood, inviting her secondary- modern classmates to judge the one-woman New Faces contests she would stage at lunchtime. Her gran used to sing a bit, but the stage was not in the Horrocks blood: her dad was a sales rep for an electrical firm, her mum a ward aid in a local hospital. I could see people in the audience getting ready to tap their feet and then the look on their faces was 'What's happening? She sounds more like Sid Vicious than Liza Minnelli.' " And did she enjoy that? "I loved it."It would be wrong to conclude that Jane Horrocks is down on showbiz. She is still stung by the unfavourable comparisons of her Sally Bowles in Sam Mendes's Cabaret with Liza Minnelli's in the film. "The whole thing was," she says, "that Liza had a great voice and the character didn't - she was a second- rate performer in a second-rate club... They thought, 'Oh great - women being debauched: we've had men behaving badly, now here are some women doing it for a change.' "For all her rejection of what she scornfully terms the "love me, love me" school of acting, Horrocks is not immune to criticism.