Actress and playwright, Katie Redford, visited KTS on Wednesday 13th January to talk to Sixth Formers and Drama students about her remarkable career. Redford briefed students about her successes and the occasional failure that she’s had to endure.
After leaving university with a first class honours degree in acting, Redford hoped to emulate her acting heroine. “I wanted to be like Kate Winslet,” Redford told NewsKnight. “But I wasn’t to be like her. I actually ended up working at a burger bar for over a year-and-a-half.I took a few years off, working in bars, clubs, restaurants and even moved to America for a year, working as a lifeguard.”
Redford returned to the UK to pursue her career in acting. Whilst still working in bars, she starred in her own comedy series on YouTube, called 2 Girls 1 Flat. She gained recognition for the series and got accepted to join the National Youth Theatre weeks later.
However, life has not always been easy for her. In January 2015, She was cast as the 14-year-old daughter of Sarah Platt in Coronation Street after producers were tricked into believing she was 19-years-old. But it has emerged that actress Katie Redford is 25, making her 11 years older than her character and just two years younger than her on-screen mother, played by Tina O'Brien. Shortly afterwards, she was bullied and abused on Facebook and Twitter by internet ‘trolls’, which lead her to suspend her social media accounts for over six months.
Redford told students of how she carried on with her pursuit of acting. “I battled through the comments,” she said, “and learnt to ignore them and carried on with my dream.”
Redford recently developed a play script with the Soho Theatre as part of the Writers’ Lab project and she has also co-written two separate television pilots. One of them being Arabella with James Farmer, which was long listed for the BAFTA Rocliffe and short listed for Triforce Creative Network’s Writer Slam.
After winning The Norman Beaton Fellowship in 2015, as part of The BBC's Radio Drama Company, she moved onto TV - staring as Cazzy in the 5th series of Sky One's Mount Pleasant.
Redford, taking questions from Drama students, gave tips on how to ace an audition, described her hobbies and her future plans.
"Take every opportunity you have in life,” she concluded, “be strong and take in the criticism because that will only make you stronger as a person."