ACTOR Joanna Scanlan has received an honorary doctorate from the university where she worked as a drama lecturer.
The Welsh-born star, whose grandfather was Irish, returned to De Montfort University (DMU) in Leicester this month to receive the honour, some 30 years after she left her role there.
Joanna Scanlan has received an honorary doctorate from De Montfort University in Leicester (Pic: DMU)The 63-year-old taught at DMU for five years in the late 1980s and early 1990s, covering the period where the institution, then known as Leicester Polytechnic, became a university.
She has since established herself as an acclaimed star of TV, film and stage, with one of her most recent roles in the BBC’s Riot Women.
This month the star returned to DMU and stood before hundreds of students at the university’s summer graduation ceremonies, to accept her doctorate.
“I came to Leicester in the late 1980s, to teach drama on the BA in Performing Arts. I was not much more than an undergraduate myself,” she said at the ceremony.
“I was very sad, very disillusioned,” she added.
“I had been thoroughly rejected by the acting profession.
“I could have framed that abject failure as the truth of my identity, but this university saved me from that,” she admitted.
"In the five years I spent at DMU, something very important happened to me: teaching turned into learning.
"I learned from my students and from my brilliant fellow lecturer that there is no distinction between teaching and doing.
"All of us both teach and do every day.”
Following the ceremony, Scanlan, who won the BAFTA for Best Actress in a Leading Role in 2020 for her performance in the film After Love, said she found herself using everything she had taught in the classroom for her star-making role as press officer Terri Coverley in political satire The Thick of It.
"While I was here teaching, one of my courses was Stanislavsky and I worked a lot on creating characters with students through Stanislavsky and what we did in The Thick of It dovetailed perfectly with that, absolutely perfectly," she said.
“Even yesterday, I was working, and I was very consciously applying the same processes I taught 30 years ago, the same ones I have used throughout my career," she added.
