Jane Horrocks
Jane Horrocks is an actor, born 1964.
The voice did it. Jane Horrocks played the title role in the stage play The Rise and Fall of Little Voice, taking a nomination for the 1993 Olivier Award for Best Actress, then played LV again in the 1998 film version, which brought Golden Globe and BAFTA nominations. The part turns on a young woman who can reproduce other singers exactly, and it made an instrument out of something most actors treat as a byproduct.
By then she was already famous for a different kind of voice entirely. Bubble in Absolutely Fabulous, a strangled Lancashire yelp of a performance, plus Katy Grin in the same series, and in the 2016 film she is credited as both Bubble and Shirley Bassey.
Animation followed logically. Babs in Chicken Run and its 2023 sequel, Fairy Mary across four Tinker Bell films and the Pixie Hollow spin-offs, the Black Widow Spider in Corpse Bride, the Lead Elf in Arthur Christmas, Watership Down, Little Princess. A generation of British children knows the voice and has no idea what she looks like.
What gets lost in all of that is that she is a very good dramatic actress. Nicola in Life Is Sweet is a raw, uncomfortable performance with no vocal trickery in it at all, Miss Irvine in The Witches came the year before, and the later television, Jericho, The Street, COBRA and Death Valley, keeps proving the point to people who only know her as Babs.
Movies (21)
- Corpse Bride (2005)
- Secret of the Wings (2012)
- Chicken Run (2000)
- Tinker Bell and the Pirate Fairy (2014)
- Tinker Bell (2008)
- Chicken Run: Dawn of the Nugget (2023)
- Tinker Bell and the Lost Treasure (2009)
- Garfield: A Tail of Two Kitties (2006)
- Pixie Hollow Games (2011)
- The Witches (1990)
- Arthur Christmas (2011)
- Memphis Belle (1990)
- Cabaret (1993)
- Little Voice (1998)
- Pixie Hollow Bake Off (2013)
- Absolutely Fabulous: The Movie (2016)
- Life Is Sweet (1991)
- A Grand Night In: The Story of Aardman (2015)
- Sunshine on Leith (2013)
- The Fifteen Streets (1989)
- Born Romantic (2000)
TV (17)
- Absolutely Fabulous (1992)
- Who Do You Think You Are? (2004)
- Performance (1991)
- Trollied (2011)
- The Storyteller (1988)
- ScreenPlay (1986)
- This Week (2003)
- COBRA (2020)
- The Street (2006)
- Death Valley (2025)
- Lily's Driftwood Bay (2014)
- Watership Down (1999)
- The Adventures of Disney Fairies (2010)
- Jericho (2005)
- Here We Go (2022)
- Little Princess (2007)
- Little Crackers (2010)
Where to start with Jane Horrocks
Little Voice is the argument. It is the film built entirely around what she can do with a voice, and it is the reason the role exists at all.
Then Life Is Sweet, and this is the important one. Nicola is unpleasant, wounded and completely unsentimental, and the performance proves the comedy is a choice rather than a limit.
Absolutely Fabulous is the fame, Bubble is pure vocal comedy and still funny, and Absolutely Fabulous: The Movie is the late victory lap. The Witches is the early one worth finding.
For the animation, Chicken Run is the best use anyone has made of her voice outside Little Voice, and Corpse Bride is the strangest. Sunshine on Leith is the warm ensemble one, and Death Valley is the current work.