Fay Ripley - Early Career

Early Career

Ripley graduated from drama school in 1990. Her first role afterwards was playing Osatko in the chorus of Around the World in 80 Days at the Liverpool Playhouse during the 1990–91 pantomime season. She had ten lines in Japanese. Her next role came at the end of the year in the Manchester Royal Exchange's production of Medea. Ripley recalled, "It was only my second job, and I took it all very seriously, in my Greek sarong and my torch of fire, having to burble in tongues."

Ripley's early television and film career was characterised by minor roles as prostitutes or mistresses; in what was to be her film debut, she filmed two scenes as a prostitute in the film Frankenstein (Kenneth Branagh, 1994). In the first scene, her character was strangled by the creature (played by Robert De Niro's stand-in). The second scene featured De Niro himself, though Ripley's character was lying dead in a mortuary throughout. Pleased with what looked like her breakout role, Ripley bought a dress for the premiere, though she was distraught when Branagh sent her a card apologising for cutting her scenes from the finished film. The same year, she filmed the role of Karen Hughes, the sister of a mute character who believes she sees a murder, in the low-budget film Mute Witness (Anthony Waller, 1995). After Mute Witness's British television premiere in 1999, a Daily Record critic wrote that Ripley's dramatic scenes were not as good as her comic ones.

In 1995, she appeared in an episode of Channel 4's Alan Davies vehicle One for the Road and made her last theatre appearance as a cast member in the Bush Theatre's Two Lips, Indifferent Red. In 1996, she had a role in Stephen Poliakoff's Frontiers, and played a club barmaid in Dennis Potter's penultimate television series Karaoke. The following year she had roles in the comedy film Roseanna's Grave (Paul Weiland, 1997), an episode of The Bill—as a woman whose nanny is accused of stealing from her—and a two-part episode of the Kevin Whately series The Broker's Man as a police officer. Her role in The Broker's Man was one of the few occasions on which Ripley played a police officer; she has frequently declined offers of similar roles because she does not want to "summon up the misery" to play a character that performs post-mortem examinations or investigates murders when she could be starring in more true to life and funny programmes.