Everyone is allowed one mistake, says actress

Press, 10 August 1982, Page 21

Everyone is allowed one mistake, says actress

From

DIANA DEKKER

in London

Sandra Gough will be back in front of the cameras at Granada Television this week—but her heart is still in New Zealand.

Granada has signed her—after a break of 11 years—to do a pilot for a possible series to be called "Bingo.” In it, the former star of “Coronation Street” will play a compulsive gambler married to a boring husband.

It is more than three years since Sandra Gough was an assistant in a Lower Hutt, Wellington, shoe shop and had a brief marriage to a University of Victoria official. Nofo Falealili, a Samoan. She still bubbles as she bubbled the morning after her Wellington wedding when I interviewed her in her Brooklyn home.

Then, dressed in a bright red suit, she offered champagne all round for breakfast and talked of having a big family. Two months later she was gone, the marriage over. She went home via Australia, Hong Kong and the West Indies. She'lives in Manchester but her dream is to go back to New Zealand. "I loved it there,” she said. "My marriage to Nofo was wrong. Perhaps I didn’t give enough thought to it.. “I knew my first husband for three years and that lasted only a week. I knew Nofo for only a few months before I married him. I was married on October 4 and was back in England in time for Christmas.

,‘Tnrnot the type of person to try and. try a thing. If I know I've made a mistake I cut my losses. I went back to my family, to my mum and dad. Some newspaper said I'd stayed in New, Zealand

for two years after my marriage broke up. but I didn’t. I was too hurt.

“My mum has a bone disease and I’ve spent the last three years looking after her. She can’t be cured. You just have to tolerate it.

“I think about going back to New Zealand to live. Honest to God. It’s a wonderful place to live and I was very happy there. “In Australia everybody is a ‘bloody foreigner’ and you get treated like a foreigner. In New Zealand they accept foreigners. They made me feel at home. At first I thought it was very, very slow and that made me nervous. But as I relaxed into the pace it made me a very happy person. “I was working in the shoe. shop at Lower Hutt when I met Nofo. I do miss having children and Nofo came from a big family. I've always been on my own and his family was very good to me and very loving. It was a big loss."

She hasn’t considered marrying again. “I have a few dates but I think everyone is frightened

of me." she said with a laugh. "My first marriage lasted only a week and my second only two months. “Besides? I haven’t been able to put my mind to things while my mum’s been ill. My dad had all the responsibility for her while I was away that time and I’ve tried to make up for it in a wav.”

Her return to television came almost by accident. “I saw a Granada casting director in the street and he asked me if I was interested in doing television again. “I didn’t know what Granada had thought of me after I walked out of ‘Coronation Street’. They knew I worked well and didn’t drink or take drugs. “People are allowed to make one mistake, aren’t the\’? They have given me another chance now and I’m very grateful. “i’ll be playing a girl who is likeable and nice and who loves bingo. Apart from that she is passionate only about her son. who is not very clever. She thinks he is a genius. Angela Crow, who was in ‘Coronation Street’ even before I was in it, will be in the pilot too.

“I don’t know when it will show here except that we have been asked to wear warm clothes, so I suppose it will be in the winter.

"Do you realise," she said, "that you are talking to me the day after my birthday? When I was in that shoe shop in Lower Hutt I had a birthday too. I got hundreds of letters and cards in that' shop. They were really genuine.

“I do think I might end up back in New Zealand if I have a chance. I write to a friend there who says I can stay with her. “She thinks I'd be better off in Auckland than in Wellington. It's so wet in Wellington. But then you couldn’t have it worse than Manchester for rain. “New Zealanders are such calm and kind people. I was really shocked when I came back to England. I was almost ashamed of the English.

“I think New Zealanders are what we were like a long time ago when we could be proud of ourselves. “Women are afraid to go out at night alone, you know. “In the north people used to be friendly, but they haven't got time for it anymore.”

Sandra said she had said almost nothing to English reporters about her television comeback.

“I think I've suffered enough in this life. I told them: ’Please give me a chance.' I said they were not to ask me about ‘Coronation Street' and all I told them about it was that I was still pleased with my decision to go-

“ 'The 'Express’ said I was 38.1 asked them to say 35." She did not accept that it didn't make a great deal of difference. "It does to me," she said, ’laughing. “I’ll have to be saving up for a facelift. I suppose you can call me 38. too. then, since they have.

"Please tell everyone in New Zealand who wants to write to me that I'd love to hear from them. They could write to Granada.

“Do you think I could go back for Telethon?

“You never know. I might get back to New Zealand.”’