Lets start at the begining!!

So where did this passion for working in the industry come from? Well it wasn't for the glam of it all thats for sure, although that does get to you sometimes.

No it all started from the simple age of 4 where I used to spend hours dancing and singing round the living room to my mum's records. Once I had mastered the record player, learning the correct speed to play them at, so Abba didn't sound like Alvin and the Chipmunks, I started to make up storylines linking the songs as key moments to the story. Playing all the roles, I sang and danced to my hearts content, well until my brother and sister arrived home from school insisting they watched the telly. As I got a bit older and took a keen interest in collecting sylvanians, I started to use them to act out Soap type stories.

By the age of 7 I started to join in with school theatre. My first role was as a country kid in the Evacuees. I loved every moment of it , the nerves, the learning of lines and the smiles on my parents faces at the end. I carried on with school acting for many years. My last role in Junior school was as Narrator in Joseph and the technicolour dream coat. It was my biggest role, and I worked really hard to get it. Although I did have to sing with a young boy called Colin, who lets just say, was not very good. Our singing teacher Mr Simms used to tell him off quite a bit.

As I ended my time with Junior school, to move into the realms of senior school, I decided to join a local theatre group at the Gordon Craig Theatre, Stevenage. There I had many fun times, making up plays, and working on major performances. One memorable moment was 'Around the World in 80 minutes' For this I had to do a dance to represent China. We had a dance teacher called Mary Tear. She used to have us in stitches, as when ever she taught us a piece of the routine she would go. 'Now it's one, two, three, one, two, three, tum, tum, tum, tum.' On the night of the performance though, the eye makeup we used made my eyes water like crazy, and so I couldn't see properly when doing the dance. Also, one of the lads called Steven ended up breathing in hairspray, and so when he came to speak his lines on stage he couldn't, as he had no voice. My days with the group were always fun, spooking each other out with tales of the theatre ghost, and dealing with bumping into famous people as they worked on shows. One experience was bumping into a certain well known actress who runs a pub, lets just say she wasn't impressed with us hanging around.

When I was 13 I joined a theatre group based in Hitchin, called Theatretrain. Here I spent most saturday afternoons doing, acting, singing and dance classes. I worked with various age groups, and we all got on really well. As part of the group we used to perform in the town square and used local schools as our main performance space for productions we would put on. It was imense fun, and I got to learn songs from various musicals, like Westside Story, etc.

In 1997, we performed at the Theatre Royal, Dury Lane.
For this we had to sing a variety of Beatles songs. It brought together all the Theatretrain companies from across the UK together. We even worked with actors from Eastenders, and celebrated the career of The Beatles. The experience of doing this was amazing!!! My previous experience of performing in London was a couple of years previous, with my school choir. We performed at the Royal Albert Hall, as part of a gala concert. I thought that was scary, but this was worse. As I stepped onto the enormous stage, and looked out into the auditorium, I thought OH MY GOD! All those spaces were to be filled with people, looking at us! I then got told by the SM to look round, as I did I was confronted by a huge helicopter. Thats right a Helicopter on a stage, in a theatre, in London!! It was for the musical Miss Siegon. This was to be one of the most scariest, yet enjoyable moments of my life!

During my senior school years, I joined in with theatre activities as much as possible, playing various roles. From, Batty old ladies in '7 wives for Dracula' to a homosexual sailor in 'Twelfth Night'. I even played Father Christmas in a play that one of our teachers wrote. So not type cast at all!!



I enjoyed my time working on school plays, we all got on really well, and constantly played practical jokes on each other. One of the best times was acting along side my English teacher Mr Wilson, who asked me for tips on the acting, as he knew I had performed at the local theatre. He was very good though in 'Twelfth Night' and could easily of played the next Bond. ;)

It was the years I spent at Heathcote, that my interest in writing and directing began. Every time we wrote stories in English I was always told how I wrote them dialogue driven, and should think about writing scripts. When I did GCSE Drama I had the opportunity to do that. In our final year we had to devise and write a script for a play that we could tour round schools. Each one of us had to come up with an idea and we would vote on the best one. My idea, which was chosen was called 'Offworld'. It was about a group of greek Gods who are sent to Earth by Zeus to teach the Earth people about pollution, and looking after the planet. It was a comedy, that had the Gods dressing up as key characters in the celebrity world, they even did a Spice Girl routine.

During my A Levels, my passion for acting began to dissapear, as tense moments within my exams pieces rose, having to deal with unreliable fellow students, and being heavily criticised by one of my teachers. She said to me, and I quote; 'Leanne, you will never be a Juliet'. And thus it was from this that I decided acting was not the career for me. However, whilst I was in sixth form, an inter-house drama competition came up, and I was asked to direct a piece for my form. For this I chose to do Adult Child/Dead Child, mainly because I wanted to prove a certain teacher wrong. When our A Level group requested to do the play we were told; 'It's a play written for one person, impossible to make it work for 6 people.' Well I had 6 people to work with, and boy did I make it work! We only had to do a 15-30 min piece, so I went through the script and took the best bits out and put it together. Making everyone play a part of the character, and as each one spoke the others acted out what they were describing. The audience loved it, and were very dissapointed with the final decission, of us coming second in the competition.

After my days at Heathcote I decided to the next step, go to university and study Film and Television! But first I had to go to college, and get better grades!