What Kitty did next

Emmerdale star Kitty McGeever talks to Lara Masters about being blind, Lizzie Lakely and why she loves geisha girls with rockabilly hairstyles!

RADA-trained actress Kitty McGeever is pragmatic about her disability: “I went blind in 2002 over a period of five months. It doesn’t really impact my daily life now; I think being blind is a manageable disability. The thing that’s hard work is that everything takes twice as long, it just takes more thinking about.”

Perhaps Kitty is somewhat detached about her blindness because complic­ations from her diabetes that provoked her vision-loss came at the time when her 15-month-old son Felix became very ill and died.

“For two years after Felix died I was quite ill and out of the game. When I began working again I did a one-woman show and that’s where I was approached by Emmerdale to play Lizzie Lakely.“

Now Kitty is in the rare position of being an actor with a permanent disability playing a resident character in a TV soap, and perhaps even more extraordinary, Lizzie has a love interest, provided by Bob Hope, played by actor Tony Audenshaw.

“Lizzie’s a very strong, very independent person and quite opinionated but there are also chinks of vulnerability that we’re starting to see. Bob is bringing out a sensitive, girly side to her that we have never seen before. I would love Lizzie and Bob to be together! And Tony is lovely to work with!

“Lizzie is definitely breaking down boundaries for disabled people and the response I get is fantastic. I had a message the other day from a lady who said she loved watching Lizzie because her daughters, who are four and five, are going blind, and it gives her hope for their future seeing someone blind portrayed on TV just getting on with it the way Lizzie does. It helps her and her kids see that it’s possible to live a normal life. I was thrilled to read that, it makes the job worthwhile.

“Lizzie uses humour as a defence and people think she’s hilarious – I get a lot of mail about how much she makes people laugh which is wonderful because it’s not about the disability and it’s great that people are seeing someone blind on telly every day as it makes blindness acceptable.“

Kitty admits to having had prejudices about disabled people and tries to “redress” the balance (excuse the pun) through her personal style: ”I was guilty of thinking that blind people looked a certain way and that’s why my image is more important to me now because I know that stereotype still exists.

“I have always loved shopping and clothes and have always had a very individual sense of style, but before losing my sight I slobbed about more and paid less attention to what I wore. Now I have a real enjoyment of clothes. It takes up a lot of my time and I put a lot of effort into how I dress. I’m very interested in fashion, fabric and the feel of fabrics. I have a memory of colour and I’ve got this fantastic colour-checker gadget which reads colours for me.

“I love 50s fashion; I have lots of 50s-style dresses but I like to urbanise them, so I’ll wear a gorgeous swing dress but then stick on my knee-high Doc Martens.

“I absolutely love the dress I have on today. It’s pink with flowers and polka-dots and covered in heads of geisha girls with rockabilly hairstyles! Oh, I just had to have it! When I first got the dress, the boning didn’t fit properly so I had it restructured. Now it’s my favourite and evokes comments wherever I go. When I got it right and I could wear the dress I was completely over the moon!”

Every woman knows the alchemy of dressing up – how it effects the way you feel and how others react to you – but as Kitty is aware, for disabled women, image takes on a whole new meaning; resplendent in her retro frock, it looks like Kitty’s the cat that got the cream!