Orla Hill: Outrageous actress, London girl

I knew her before she had a Wikipedia page

This isn’t the sort of thing I usually write, but I think you’ll understand why I’ve done it. And, anyway, it is very much a London story.

Its subject, Orla Hill, is the youngest of my six children. I write this in the run up to the start of the TV drama Outrageous, which will come out later this month and has already had lots of publicity.

Outrageous is about the Mitford sisters: in order of birth, Nancy, Pamela, Diana, Unity, Jessica and Deborah. They were English aristocrats who rose to fame and, in some cases, sank into notoriety in the 1930s.

Orla will be playing Deborah - “Debo” as she was nicknamed. Born in 1920, Deborah had one of the lower Mitford profiles before the war and, unlike at least three of her older siblings, including her sole brother, Tom, was not a fascist and sympathiser with Nazism. Later in life she became the Duchess of Devonshire, synonymous with the popular stately home, Chatsworth House. She died in 2014.

Orla is far from being the most prominent member of the Outrageous cast, but the character she plays is integral to the show, and I’m assuming her involvement explains why, last month, someone created a Wikipedia page about her.

With that in mind it seemed to me that viewers of Outrageous and others with an interest in it might like to know a little more about Orla, her past acting endeavours and how these have been influenced by her life in the city I write about. That is what this article will provide.

Orla Maureen Fitzsimons Hill was born in Homerton Hospital in Hackney, east London on 9 May, 2002. She went to Millfields Community primary school in Hilsea Street in Hackney, followed by Mossbourne Community Academy, next to Hackney Downs. All three locations are short walks from the family home she lived in throughout her childhood, off Lower Clapton Road, London E5.

The same is true of the place where she first learned about acting. The Anna Fiorentini Theatre and Film School was a Prince’s Trust business founded by Anna Fiorentini herself, a local woman who, as it happened, lived next door to Orla’s childminder.

Anna’s goal was to give Hackney children of all abilities the opportunity every Saturday to act, dance and sing, including in a big variety show held every year at the glorious old Hackney Empire Theatre.

The first time Orla auditioned to join the school, aged seven, she was unsuccessful. That was no reflection on her or Anna’s fantastic organisation. The school’s priority was to have as even as possible a spread of ages and mix of sexes in its classes. You won’t be surprised to learn that there were more eager little girls hoping to get in than there were teenage boys.

However, when Orla had another go some months later, she was successful. And so, from the age of seven or eight, every Saturday morning she would be walked by me or my wife, Orla’s mum, Sheila Fitzsimons, to Clapton Girls secondary school (nowadays Clapton Girls’ Academy), which allowed Anna and her team use of some of its space. Fetched home again mid-afternoon, Orla always had plenty to talk about, especially when rehearsals for the Hackney Empire show intensified.

She was lucky to have some excellent, very committed teachers, including the inspiring dancer and choreographer, Mark Short. Her contemporaries included others who have gone on to be professional performers, including Xavien Russell, Tahj Miles, Corinna Brown, Jaden Oshenye, Charlie Jones and Belinda Owusu.

A few years older than Orla was Jermain Jackman who, in 2014, won The Voice UK. Somewhere, I have a piece of video of a teenage Jermain blowing the roof off Hackney Town Hall at a Fiorentini event with a breathtaking rendition of You’ll Never Walk Alone, while Orla and others stood neatly behind him waiting for their chances to perform.

Orla appeared in Hackney Empire variety shows with most of, if not all, the children of around her age mentioned above, and with some of them, along with others, in the Fiorentini performance troupe, a small group of the school’s attendees which sang and danced for audiences ranging from elderly people in hospitals, to financial services workers in City banks, to community festivals. All of this was fantastic, grounding experience for her.

Another mainstay of the Fiorentini school – and still integral to its since much-expanded endeavours - was Rhiannon Mosson, who headed the school’s agency. Orla signed up and got her first professional job at, I think, the age of eight. The audition, for a children’s television show, required crossing the city by tube to an office somewhere off Cromwell Road, where she was asked to demonstrate a trick she could do and to read out some lines.

On the way home, Orla was despondent: she didn’t think she’d done very well. But a few days later we heard from the agency that she had been asked to do a voiceover for an animation. Soon after, at a recording studio I think somewhere in the West End, she delivered a piece of script very nicely. Her fee was 50 quid.

Her first big break came not long after, when she auditioned for a film. Since the pandemic, almost all her initial auditions have been self-taped. But before Covid they were always in person. In those days, my working hours were more flexible than Sheila’s, so it tended to be me who took her, after school, on buses, trains and tubes to see casting directors in houses, offices or studios, clutching carefully learned “sides” and anxious to be on time.

For the film, which was called Song for Marion, we again struck out for inner west London, emerging from Earl’s Court Underground station and locating an address off Earl’s Court Road. Orla was one of a succession of adorable small girls shuttling in, doing their bit to a camera, then shuttling out again. “Good work!” said the casting director to us as we left.

A few days later, Orla received a “call back” – a request for a second audition. It meant she had a serious chance of being cast. This time, our destination was the Spotlight studio, at that time just off Leicester Square.

Orla was ushered in to a room with the casting director and someone I later discovered was Paul Andrew Williams, director of the film itself. Bits of their conversation reached me as I sat waiting in reception. Orla said something that made the other two laugh.

A week or so later, while she was having a swimming lesson at the King’s Hall Leisure Centre, Rhiannon phoned with the news that Orla had been offered the part and that the cast would also include Vanessa Redgrave, Terence Stamp, Gemma Arterton and Christopher Eccleston - four giants of English acting.

It meant that Orla, by then aged nine, spent part of the summer of 2011 in and around Durham and Newcastle with her parents and a galaxy of stars making the movie – which was officially London-set – and having a lot of fun with Paul, who she has worked with again a few times since, and everyone else involved. Christopher was as kind to her as his real self as he was as her screen dad.

After that, it was back to auditioning. Sheila or I travelled with Orla all over the city: to theatres in Islington, Bermondsey and Barking; to the Ealing Film Studios; to Bloomsbury Central Baptist church; to little offices in nooks of the West End; to casting directors’ homes in Queen’s Park, Kentish Town and Notting Hill; to Spotlight again (and again); to a producer’s office on Gray’s Inn Road; to the University of Westminster on Marylebone Road, which saw Orla cast in a great student short called Lily And The Revolution.

Mostly, auditions took five minutes and came to nothing. Sometimes, there would be a callback, followed by days or weeks of anxious waiting - Orla was far more grown-up and sensible about this than her parents, especially me – which, again, would come to nothing. But every year, there would be something. Then came Swallows and Amazons.

This new film version of Arthur Ransome’s famous children’s novel, set in the Lake District, had a difficult birth. The first auditioning process, involving “workshops” and frequent changes of mind by the original would-be directorial team, took ages before the whole thing fell apart.

Sheila, by that time with more elastic hours, was Lead Parent for that saga. But when Nick Barton, the project’s admirably determined producer, got it back on the road and Orla was again invited to audition, it was me who chaperoned her to the casting director’s office above a guitar shop in Denmark Street, historically known as London’s Tin Pan Alley.

Having bored the poor child rigid in a café nearby with tales of David Bowie, Charlie Chaplin and the Rolling Stones, I sat with her on the landing outside the room where another girl was reading for the role of Susan Walker. I could just about hear her through the door. To me, she sounded very impressive.

Then Orla went in and came out again, and by the time we were descending the escalator into Tottenham Court Road station I had convinced myself she had no chance of becoming Susan. Such was the state of ludicrous parental pessimism into which I could sometimes plunge (when I wasn’t floating on equally ludicrous clouds of dizzy optimism).

In the end – thankfully, with Sheila again as chaperone – Orla, after a few more auditions and even some sailing instruction at Wembley Sailing Club on the Welsh Harp, was chosen. She went on to have a great time, age 13, in the summer of 2015 with the other Swallows and Amazons child actors, bobbing about on the cherished waters of Cumbria and doing scenes with Kelly Macdonald and Andrew Scott, both of whom were lovely with their young co-stars. The film was released in August 2016.

Another nice part quickly followed: as Emily Calendar in the long-running CBBC adaptation of Jaqueline Wilson’s children’s story, Hetty Feather. Orla was originally invited to audition for the part of a servant girl, but after being seen at the New Diorama Theatre off Euston Road she was offered the part of the independent-minded young lady of Calendar Hall.

Although the series was set in London, it was filmed in Kent, which meant catching trains from Stratford International. Orla shot her first episode, which was the final one of series three, in September 2016 when she was 14, and the whole of the next series (broadcast the following spring and summer) from July 2017.

Preparations for that one were exciting for me because they entailed going with Orla to Cosprop, a major professional London costumier on Holloway Road, and then to a little workshop tucked away in Tufnell Park, where Orla was fitted with a special frock and given a pair of very old boots to wear with it, which had the name “Jane Asher” written inside them in biro (younger readers, look her up).

Such trips were little voyages of discovery into the buzzing labyrinths of London’s creative industries, so vital to its life and character. Another kind followed, as had happened with Song for Marion, with an appointment at a post-production facility. In this case it was close to Oxford Circus, where members of the Hetty cast re-recorded or added the odd line of script.

In advance of the third series being broadcast, the cast and crew had gathered in celebratory mood at the Roxy Bar and Screen, a little independent venue on Borough High Street, to watch finished episodes for the first time. It was soon after turned into a branch of KFC. Such a shame.

The next few years might be summed up as a mixture of acting, exams and the pandemic. Orla, by now represented by Curtis Brown, continued to audition, got parts in Holby City, A Confession and very nearly a few other things. Covid was hugely disruptive to the film and TV industries and, as with all the country’s schoolchildren, to Orla’s education.

Like every other 18-year-old who had been gearing up to sit A-levels in the summer of 2020, she was unable to because the schools were closed. Fortunately, though, she was firmly on course for the grades she needed to go Cambridge to study engineering, which she did after a (Covid-disrupted) Year in Industry, working for a train manufacturer.

She also managed to squeeze in a cameo appearance as a daughter of the title character in Stonehouse. Then came the role of Ruby Foxcroft in A Good Girl’s Guide To Murder, which is filmed in Bristol and first went out last year. And then came Outrageous.

Today, of course, Orla is a young woman with around 15 years’ experience in the acting business. She is also, as I write this, in the final few weeks of her four years at Cambridge, where (as Wikipedia correctly mentions) she is now a researcher at the university’s Centre for Climate Repair.

She still has a bedroom at her family home, though – Hackney hasn’t got rid of her yet – and it was from that home that she would depart at dawn on many mornings last summer, collected in a car that would carry her away to the badlands of Buckinghamshire to become Debo Mitford for the day.

Like almost every parent, I often wonder what has made my children the way they are. In Orla’s case, some things are obvious: she gets her brains and her beauty from her mum. Her appetite and aptitude for acting, though, are less easily explained.

For almost all of her childhood, both Sheila and I were working in journalism. Though interested in TV, film and theatre, we have no background in it. We sometimes speculate that Orla learned how to gain and hold an audience’s attention because as a little girl she had to work so hard to get a word in when sitting round a rather loud and crowded kitchen table with two big sisters and three big brothers.

Not only is she the youngest of my six, she is four years younger than the next youngest and 17 years younger than the eldest. Strictly speaking, two of the brothers and one of the sisters are half-siblings, though Orla has never thought of them as anything other than fully-connected. Two of them now have children of their own, meaning Orla is a popular auntie of three nieces and a nephew, all of them born in east London, just like her.

As I said at the beginning, Orla’s is very much a London story. I don’t know what will happen in the performing arts part of it next – only very famous actors, and sometimes not even them, know for sure where their next job is going to come from. But I do know that it couldn’t have unfolded in quite the way it has so far without all the things the city, with its endless creativity and infinite variety, has helped to make possible for her.

I hope it’s a positive, optimistic story. I think it is. But then I’ve always been a fan.

Outrageous will be available on UKTV’s free streaming platform U and U & Drama from 19 June. The photo of Orla, taken by the photographer dad of a friend of hers when she was in her teens, is from her Curtis Brown CV page.