Fernandez: In and out of The Office

Having twice flirted with TV stardom, Sunil Peck finds Julie Fernandez wondering why she’s recognised in the street but not as a campaigner by disabled people in her own community

Julie Fernandez is best known for appearing in the TV sitcom The Office. But she’d never dreamt about a part in a classic series. In fact, she had no ambition to act at all and hoped to go to polytechnic to study German and Business Studies. She applied to five polytechnics who rejected her saying that their buildings were not accessible to wheelchair users. She tried instead applying for a course in hotel management but was told that she could not do that because she would be unable to handle silver service. After 30 or 40 rejections, she had no idea what her future held. But then staff at her school received a phone call from the BBC out of the blue.

“They asked if there was anyone who could play Vanessa Lockhead in a soap they were making called Eldorado. I had always done drama at school, my name was put forward, I went for the audition and got the job.”

That was in 1992. It would be another ten years before Julie appeared in The Office as Brenda. She says that The Office has been the “best experience” in her 16 year media career, but she rarely watches the DVD now.

“My husband Andrew does, he loves it. He quotes it at me and he gets annoyed because I don’t know what he’s quoting. It’s a script! I learn it, I say it, and then I forget it.”

There has been some TV and radio work since, but how disappointed is she that The Office did not lead to more high profile roles?

“It has disappointed me for many years before that. Eldorado had nine to ten million viewers per episode three days a week and my character was one of the main characters in the show.”

The episodes of The Office she appeared in were produced by Ash Atalla who is disabled and she says that without more disabled producers, agents, writers and casting directors, disabled characters will predominantly play roles as “brave individuals who climb mountains, people who overcome their disabilities or baddies with false eyes and artificial limbs who want to take over the world.”

Julie is not fussy about the kind of roles she plays in the future, goodie or baddie, newspaper editor or even a mother and she is not fussy about the genre either – as long as the role challenges her versatility as an actor and is character-led rather than being defined by her disability.

The couple have no children yet, but are excited about the prospect of becoming foster parents.

They’ve had long conversations about having their own baby but Andrew had concerns about the risk of Julie ending up with lots of broken bones as a result of spending months lying in bed.

Although Julie has opted to become a foster parent, she respects other disabled people who choose to have their own children.

“If I have my own child, it will have a 50/50 chance of having brittle bone disease. As wonderful a life as I have had, I’ve had 70 operations and 100 fractures which is an awful lot of pain and difficulty. It is not easy to live with and I don’t wish to give that to another child.”

Once they have completed a training course, the couple will be in a position to provide respite care for a disabled child. Julie has an added incentive to offer this kind of service. She says that her own family would have benefitted from it which would have enabled them to spend time together free of the strain on their lives caused by her condition.

“A lot of the attention was on me because of all of the fractures and spending pretty much most of my first 12 years in Great Ormond Street hospital. My brother must have found it very difficult growing up.”

Eventually, Julie intends to devote more time to fostering which could involve caring for non-disabled children too.

It might come as a surprise to some that someone who champions equality for disabled children also thinks that special schools can have a place in the education of disabled children.

Julie says that whether a disabled pupil attends a mainstream or a special school should be determined by his or her disability and support needs.

“As a person with brittle bone disease, going to a mainstream school would not have been a sensible option for me because it would have been too dangerous. Schools that specialise in children with disabilities can cater for children in a way that a mainstream school could never do because they don’t have the funding.”

Julie was a pupil at Treloar school in Hampshire which had its own driving instructor with adapted cars, hospital and physical and occupational therapists which meant that her physical needs could be integrated into her everyday schooling.

While things are quiet on the media front, Julie has been devoting time to campaigning. We meet a few days after Julie co-hosted an event promoting voluntary work for disabled people.

Another cause close to her heart is the plight of mothers of children with undiagnosed conditions, brittle bone disease for instance, who can face accusations of child abuse from the police and social services after taking their children to A&E with fractures and broken bones.

“It happened to my mum and it’s happened to the parents of many of my friends. It’s rife in the UK not just with brittle bone disease, but with many disabilities.”

She has her own charity too, the Disability Foundation, which is staffed by disabled people and offers the kind of complementary therapies which have helped her recover from surgery. Therapies like massages, reflexology, acupuncture and shiatsu.

She also works with the campaigner Phil Friend running equality and diversity workshops.

Phil says that her acting skills have proved to be an effective tool for raising awareness of disability issues in businesses.

“Not only is she an actress, but she is very passionate about equality and disability rights. Sometimes she can be very forthright and other times she can be very subtle. It just depends on the audience. It’s a different form of campaigning.”

But despite her campaigning for greater equality and her achievements as an actor, there is something nagging away at the back of Julie’s mind which makes her think that she has said or done something to offend the disability community. She says that Mary Wilkinson’s book on the most influential disabled people has been an excellent read. But she is miffed that she was not considered worthy of inclusion and that she was not even approached to contribute to the chapters on people who she considers to be her colleagues and peers.

“It’s a bit disappointing but I’m not bitter. My career has been very much acting and presenting, but I have been quite high profile and worked very hard over the years to support and fight for equal rights for people with disabilities in lots of different ways. It’s a bit disappointing because it makes me think where am I going wrong that I’m not included in this list of people who I have worked so often and so hard with?”

So what does the future hold for Julie? Going by her career trajectory with its gap of ten years between Eldorado and The Office, it will be 2012 before she lands another big role on TV.

But she has co-written a comedy sketch show aimed at disabled and non-disabled people which is based on the real life experiences of disabled people which she is pitching to TV executives.

She is keen to write about her experiences of seeing ghosts and she has also spent the last year trying to secure a publishing deal for her autobiography. Whatever the future has in store, Julie says that her experiences so far would make fascinating material for a book.

“I’ve got a Jewish East End gangster father, an Austrian Catholic mother and half of my family in Austria were members of the Nazi party. Some of them were pro-Nazi and some of them were involved in helping people to escape. I’ve travelled around the world, worked in the media industry, lived in LA working for CBS television and fought for the rights of disabled people.”

Julie never knew the Kray twins, but her father did. She did grow up with other gangsters, or “bad people” as she describes them, but her perspective of them is very different to the brutal image most of us are familiar with.

“I used to have these plasters that went from my toes up to my waist with an area cut out to go to the toilet. Often, if my father and brother weren’t at home and I needed to go to the loo and my mother couldn’t lift me, this gentleman friend of mine, who is a gangster, would take me to the toilet. That’s how I grew up knowing him. He helped me, I don’t know him any differently. What can I say?”