She may not be a household name yet but that’s likely to change soon as Olivia Cooke continues her meteoric rise to fame
Oldham has a long and proud tradition of producing acting talent and a new name has now been added to the town’s cast list. Olivia Cooke has joined the star-studded roll call of Eric Sykes, Ralf Little, Anne Kirkbride, Suranne Jones and Bernard Cribbins and more who have started their careers in the town.
There is now a well-trodden path from the stage doors of Oldham’s theatres to film and television studios and 21-year-old Olivia is the latest to make the transition.
She spent years from the age of eight in the ensemble at the Oldham Theatre Workshop and had her first lead role when she was 17, as Maria in a school production of West Side Story. She went from that to the lead role in an Oldham Theatre Workshop’s version of Prom: The Musical and within a year she was on television.
She appeared in a number of adverts and in the video for a One Direction tour video where she had a piggyback from Harry Styles and in 2012 the former pupil of Royton and Crompton Secondary School, left Oldham Sixth Form College before completing her A-levels for parts in two BBC mini-series.
The first role was as Christopher Eccleston’s daughter in Blackout and later that year she played a wartime schoolteacher in The Secret of Crickley Hall, parts of which were filmed in Downham.
Since then she has had success in the States in Bates Motel, a tv series prequel to Hitchcock’s Psycho. And she has made the move from small screen to big, with roles in three films – The Quiet Ones, The Signal and Ouija – already under her belt and a fourth released this summer. Me and Earl and the Dying Girl received a standing ovation when it premiered at this year’s Sundance Film Festival where it was awarded the US Grand Jury Prize and the Audience Award for US Drama.
Olivia, who has said she feels much more at home in front of the cameras than on a stage, is also due to appear in the American film Katie Says Goodbye and will have starring roles in The Limehouse Golem and the Steven Spielberg movie Ready Player One which is due to be released in 2017.
Olivia, the daughter of a former policeman a mum who works in sales, is also said to have been shortlisted for a role in Star Wars film as her stock continues to rise.
