In 1991, the actress Sharon D Clarke was appearing on stage in Manchester when she got a phone call saying that Top of the Pops wanted her to appear on that week's show. Clarke provided the soulful vocals on Nomad's British house music classic (I Wanna Give You) Devotion, which was racing to No 2 in the charts. "But I was like, I'm in this show ..." she recalls. For the band's record company, it was too big a chance to miss. "They bought out the whole theatre for the night, so I could go and do it."
Acting and singing have intertwined through her career ever since. Now 58, Clarke was in The Singing Detective ("I played a night nurse; Michael Gambon used to chase me around the set with his psoriasis make-up on") and would later become known to TV audiences as consultant Lola Griffin in Holby City.
But she was also building a formidable career on stage. She was in Rent, Fame and The Lion King, and starred as the original Killer Queen in the musical We Will Rock You. She would go on to win a triple crown of Olivier awards: best supporting actress in 2014 (for The Amen Corner), best actress in a musical in 2019 (for Caroline, or Change) and the most coveted prize of all, best actress, in 2020 (for Death of a Salesman).
In person, Clarke has a natural presence: she's tall, glamorous, passionate. And this autumn, she's in another trinity of exciting projects. On BBC One, we'll see her in the eight-part adaptation of Booker Prize-winner Bernardine Evaristo's 2013 novel Mr Loverman, about a West Indian Londoner (Lennie James), who has been hiding the fact that he's gay from his wife Carmel (Clarke) for 50 years. On Channel 5, meanwhile, she takes the title role in the police detective drama Ellis, and in November, Clarke will star as Lady Bracknell, alongside Doctor Who's Ncuti Gatwa, in The Importance of Being Earnest at the National.
Yet even after the acclaimed Young Vic production of Death of a Salesman, which revisited Arthur Miller's play from the perspective of an African-American family, Clarke hadn't expected to play Wilde. Death of a Salesman, she says, "is this seminal play, but I'd never seen myself in it. I'd always seen it as in the white canon of theatre. I'd never looked at it like, wouldn't it be great to play that?"
The production was a triumph but still, she notes, "I've not really seen any black folks doing Oscar Wilde. I mean, Bridgerton is a very new experience for society. And lots of people have their view on that." She hopes, though, that "now that people are used to seeing that, they may open their hearts a bit more to how important it is". But she's also just looking forward to being in a comedy after a run of heart-wrenching stage roles.
Clarke grew up in London to parents of the Windrush generation: "My dad came over in 1949-50 and my mum in '51, they married in '52, and when they got to Tottenham they were the first black couple on the street. So that came with a lot of madness, as you can imagine. My mum told me stories; there was a woman who lived about five doors down the road from them who said to my mum, 'So what's it like living in a house?' When my mum asked, 'What do you mean?' She said, 'Well, you live in caves, don't you?' "
Her father was a carpenter; her mother worked at home as a seamstress and Clarke remembers growing up in a house full of "latchkey kids" from the street's other houses, with her mum feeding them all amid the hubbub. It was one of the reasons she was desperate to play Carmel. "I read the book when it came out," she says. "I was just like, 'I love this woman. Give me a chance to tell her story, to let her live.'"
She wanted "to give homage to my mum and my aunt and all the matriarchs in that community that stand up through everything". (Sometimes she'll step deliberately into the rhythms - and present tense - of Caribbean speech.) The story hit home in another way, too, she says, "as a gay woman myself".
"I love the fact that we have this story about elders in the Caribbean community dealing with gay love. That's something that I'd never seen before, never read before, because it's been so taboo in Caribbean society and African society."
"I did a play in 2016 called Pigs and Dogs by Caryl Churchill at the Royal Court. It was a 15-minute show about African sexuality and gay love, lesbian love, LGBTQ, the whole alphabet. And what was really interesting is that it was able to show that before missionaries got to Africa, there was a name or a term for almost every kind of sexual love. And it was only when Christians came over and spouted their dogma that allowing people to love in the way that they love, without harm, got turned on its head. And now that we're in this situation where gay love and homosexuality is illegal in Africa, you can be killed, you can be imprisoned. That wasn't so centuries ago.
"It's never dealt with in my culture," she adds. To be a part of "something that tells that story, and tells it with heart, with love, with truth" - even if it is sometimes "really painful and hard to watch" - means a lot to her.
Her mother was a churchgoer, but her parents didn't force religion on her. They began taking her to dance school, when she was six, and never suggested she "get a proper job", but they did insist she get an education. She's a trained social worker.
We talk about Ellis, in which she gives the sort of deeply ingrained performance as a DCI parachuted into a rural community to investigate the case of a missing teenager, that it almost seems as if she's lived it. She hasn't, but she did talk to Irene Afful, the first black female detective inspector in Merseyside police. Clarke feels as if she has crashed through a barrier herself. "I have never seen a black woman be a lead in a show in Britain and have the title role."
I mention Luther, which proved indisputably that a character played by a black actor could front a hit primetime show. Idris Elba, she notes, had to leave Britain and make a name for himself in the US, as Stringer Bell in The Wire, before that happened. Indeed, Nottingham-born Lennie James, who plays the title role in Mr Loverman, did the same thing, long before he played DCI Tony Gates in Line of Duty.
David Harewood suggested that it was the only way black actors could find opportunities to act. Clarke wanted to stay and be a role model for young people. "When I was young, I just didn't see black people on telly," she says. "I was lucky in the fact that I sing, so I wasn't, early in my career, relying just on straight acting work to live and breathe. I could do musical theatre. I could go off and do cabaret."
She notes that Marianne Jean-Baptiste, the first black British actor to be nominated for an Oscar [for Mike Leigh's Secrets & Lies in 1997], had to go to the US "because she wasn't getting work. I mean, if you can be nominated for an Oscar, and you still can't work in your own country, that says so much."
Things are changing though, she believes, on sets, too, although she does take one key inspiration from America - in Democratic candidate Kamala Harris and the way she embodies "hope": "She's glorious... if they don't vote for her, then they get everything that they deserve."
She's still recovering from the way that the outgoing British government treated the arts during Covid: "When we were told, as an industry, to retrain. The last government, for me, actively destroyed the arts. I can only pray that this Labour government has more respect for what it does for society. It's the soul of society. It shows us who we are as people, teaches us to have empathy, to see life through someone else's eyes. It's not elitist. If we lose art in this country, we're sunk. We have to keep it accessible." And with that, she gives me a big warm, Caribbean hug, and leaves. Sharon D Clarke is just getting into her stride.
Mr Loverman begins on BBC One on October 14 at 9pm; Ellis begins on Channel 5 in October