Sian Blake: From triumph to tragedy – the life and death of the EastEnders actress

It began as the classic showbusiness fairytale. The young hopeful is making ends meet as a telephone receptionist when she auditions for a bit part in EastEnders – a blink and you’ll miss her role as a nurse.

The casting directors spot something. They ask her to sing a number, which she does, nervously – Harlem on My Mind, her favourite song.

They make her a star. Handed the leading role of folk singer Frankie Pierre, actress Sian Blake becomes famous.

The girl who once lived in an East End tower block tells interviewers of being able to afford to dine in fancy restaurants, of having been so desperate to make it, “I would have done this job for nothing”.

But this week her story ended in tragedy. Post-mortems were being conducted today on what are believed to be the bodies of Ms Blake, 43, and her children Zachary, eight, and Amon, four, after they were found buried in the garden of the family home in Erith, south-east London.

Murder squad detectives were appealing for help tracing Arthur Simpson-Kent, 48, Ms Blake’s partner and the boys’ father – amid reports that the hairdresser had fled to Ghana.

The sense of tragedy around her life is compounded by the fact that Ms Blake, long faded from popular memory after her nine-month EastEnders stint ended in 1997, had been suffering from the terminal degenerative illness motor neurone disease in the years before her death.

And, of course, there was the fact that Ms Blake’s “overnight” success had, like so many other “overnight” successes, been earned by 20 years of hard work and hard knocks. Beginning at Beaumont Primary School, Leyton.

“I used to round up the kids in the playground,” the actress once recalled, “and get them to put on adaptations of musicals.”

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Her parents, factory workers Lloyd and Lindell, had divorced when Sian was six, resulting in her moving into the tower block in Leyton with her mother and older brother and sister.

She remained close to her father, however. When he died in February 1991, after suffering a massive heart attack while at the factory, the 18-year-old Sian was devastated. Throughout her career she would be reduced to tears when telling interviewers about his death.

Months later, she started at Guildford School of Acting – and immediately impressed senior tutor Ian Ricketts.

“What has remained with me most vividly,” said Mr Ricketts, “was her suitability for life with a capital L. She stood out as a person. She had a great dignity, a fine intelligence, and a lovely sense of humour. I never heard an ill word about her – which is quite something among actors.”

And yet roles were initially hard to come by. To survive, she started working as a part-time telephone receptionist.

Then came EastEnders.

In June 1996 Ms Blake entered the strange world of the soap opera star – and for her, it was very strange.

Some viewers failed to distinguish between reality and the fiction of Ms Blake’s man-eating, marriage-wrecking character. She received hate mail, and at least one death threat.

When she decided to leave the soap after 56 episodes, it was reported that misdirected public hostility had been a contributing factor.

Plenty of post-soap parts followed – Radio 4 narrations, Rosaline in Shakespeare’s Love’s Labours Lost for the English Touring Theatre, a key role in the well-received West End play Joe Guy in 2007, as well as appearances in The Bill and Casualty – but very little public attention.

If there were any traces of the bitterness that sometimes clings to the once briefly famous, she didn’t let it show. Her neighbours recalled a happy woman who didn’t feel the need to mention her EastEnders past.

Her current agent, Joanna Jones, of Bananafish Management, spoke of “a wonderful actress and a fantastic mum – polite, articulate and just lovely”.

“We had our second children around the same time,” said Ms Jones. “We spoke often of the children. She idolised the boys. They always came first, over any acting work.”

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Told she had also been working as a sign language tutor, Mr Ricketts, her old teacher, was unsurprised. “She would have had immediate empathy with those who were disadvantaged but less able than her to meet the world,” he said.

Lately, however, it was Ms Blake herself who needed help. Neighbours spoke of a woman who had enjoyed climbing, sailing and scuba-diving being rendered increasingly frail by motor neurone disease.

There were hints, too, of something darker. “In November,” said one neighbour, “she started wearing dark glasses. We wondered if she had been beaten up.”

As the murder inquiry continued, the Independent Police Complaints Commission was called in amid questions about the handling of the initial missing persons investigation and why it apparently took three weeks before the bodies were found.

Mr Ricketts first heard about what was happening via a midnight radio news bulletin. He “ostriched”, hoping it was not about the actress he knew as a strikingly poised 19-year-old.

But it was. “I was surprised,” he said, “then distressed.”