In a Wolverhampton hospital in 1961, a British screen legend who needs little introduction was born: Dame Meera Syal.
In 2026, it seems inevitable that the 65-year-old has enjoyed a decorated four-decade-long career paralleled by the likes of Emma Thompson, Jennifer Saunders and Olivia Colman.
She’s one of the creative masterminds behind TV hits like Goodness Gracious Me and The Kumars at No. 42; the author of poignant novel-turned-movie Anita and Me; and, of course, the other half to her longtime creative partner, and real-life husband, Sanjeev Bhaskar.
But when she took those first breaths in the Black Country, her path was not so clear.
Continuing the proud family tradition of coming from ‘rebel’ stock (her grandparents joined the Independence movement, and her parents eloped), it was clear to Syal from an early age that she was ‘not like the other South Asian girls’, as she tells Metro.
‘I was always thinking: “What’s wrong with me? Why don’t I fit in? Why don’t I want to be a pharmacist and get married at 22? Why do I find things funny that nobody else finds funny? Why do I want to be an actor, for God’s sake? Where did that come from?”
‘There’s nobody in my family that does that. There’s nobody on screen that looks like me. There’s nobody in the theatre that looks like me. Where the hell does this little seed come from?’ she tells me of those turbulent adolescent days.
Growing up in two worlds
Being a child of immigrants is an in-built acting school fuelled by the need to survive in worlds that couldn’t be more different – wedged on either side of your front door.
‘I described the schizophrenia that outside the house I was one person with a different accent, a different walk, a different sense of humour, and then literally, it’s like the door was passport control.
‘You enter the door and your walk changes, your accent changes, your behaviour changes. So there was always this jumping from one world to another, and it was really stark sometimes. But I began to realise that actually that is brilliant training for being an actor,’ she says.
Still, societal stigma within her community meant that family friends and relatives swatted away her pipe dreams of making it in show business. Yet, her parents made the biggest gamble of their lives and decided to back her.
‘To say to your eldest child: “Yes, go off and try acting, you have our blessing.” I still can’t get my head around it. It’s extraordinary,’ she says in awe.
Now, both her parents have gone, and it is after their deaths that she realised it was the right time to write her memoir, Vigilauntie, as an ode to their sacrifices and the aunties that she grew up at first fearing but, eventually, learned to love.
‘[The book] begins with [my parents] landing here, and it ends with them leaving. There’s this saying: “Every time an elder dies, a library burns down”.
‘You suddenly realise that when you lose your parents, particularly as an immigrant child, it was your last real living link to your homeland. Now you are the keeper of a legacy.’
Shock cancellations and nightmare auditions
It’s poignant then that for British South Asians, she’s welcomed as part of the extended family.
Her trailblazing shows Goodness Gracious Me and The Kumars at No. 42 quenched the drought of authentic representation for a generation of immigrants searching for a piece of home in a foreign land.
‘It was absolutely life-changing,’ she says of the show they ‘flung together against all the odds’ that just marked its 30th anniversary.
‘We weren’t trying to explain to anyone who we were. We didn’t think: “Let’s make a programme to teach white people what brown people are like.” We honestly just did the stuff that made us laugh together. And if a general audience got it, great,’ she reflects.
It was a relentless three-year process to get the BBC to commission the TV version, but, in an ever-changing world, she glumly notes: ‘I don’t know if it would be made today because it didn’t fit any algorithm.’
Despite its ‘huge amount of success’, Goodness Gracious Me was ‘dropped so suddenly’ by the BBC for ‘no good reason other than: “Well, we’ve done that now”’ as Syal tells it. But it taught her a valuable lesson about ‘expecting the unexpected’ and keeping on regardless.
‘Every time my career has shifted, it’s because I’ve helped create the work. It’s not because I’ve sat by a phone waiting for it to ring.’
It’s one of many obstacles the actress has faced over the years – like when she auditioned for her ‘absolute heroine’, the late and great Victoria Wood, to ‘nightmarish’ results.
Or as Syal calls it: ‘The low point of my professional life…’
She recalls ‘the nightmare memory’ with a faint trace of horror.
‘I remember seeing her on New Faces when I was a teenager, going: “Oh my God, who is she? And if she can do it, maybe [I can],” because I just thought she was brilliant, subversive, deeply feminist, totally her own woman…’
Unfortunately, her one shot ended up being ‘the worst audition I’ve done in my life because it meant too much. I loved her too much. I wanted to work with her too much, and I brought in this utter air of desperation.
‘It’s the same principle for dating: don’t be desperate; it just chases everyone away.’
For those who pick up her memoir, she recalls in yet more detail, ‘a bad Julie Walters impression, half Mrs Overall, half Brummie, wholly awful.’
Resilience is the lifeblood of any creative career, however, and there have also been ‘pinch-me’ moments that have stayed with Syal long after the camera has stopped rolling. Like having the chance to bring Granny Kumar to life – aka ‘unleash her naughtier spirit’.
‘I got to flirt with a whole number of extremely lovely male guests, who I’d never dream of doing as myself, but because she was a naughty old lady, she could get away with it. That taught me just to be brave,’ she reminisces with a laugh.
A Triple Bad Bet: Old, female and Brown
Nowadays, she’s left behind the need for career markers and is grateful for the ‘adventure’ of whatever role comes her way next. In this case, she’s starring in Lyric Hammersmith’s The Children in an ‘extraordinary’ role she’s called ‘scary and exciting and challenging’.
‘I’ve survived. I think survival is a marker because I know how many people don’t, and I’ve seen friends fall along the way who didn’t make it or decided to do something else or are not here anymore,’ she reflects.
In fact, her main quest is to work with more female directors. Something she did while playing fictional punk icon Sister Squire in Nida Manzoor’s We Are Lady Parts.
‘I’m still waiting for Nida to just write a whole series about Sister Squire,’ she says. She’s all too aware that as a woman her age in the industry, the work to shake things up is far from over.
‘I used to be a triple threat; now I’m a triple Bad Bet. I’m old, female and Brown. It’s like all three things that will not get you work, but you just hope that every role you do changes people’s perceptions,’ she jokes.
Humble as ever, she says that even if she isn’t the one to reap the benefits, she hopes the next generation are.
Inspired by the industry rabble-rousers like the aforementioned Wood, French and Saunders and Shonda Rhimes, she does mention one call she’s still waiting to get.
‘I would do anything to be in Bridgerton. I’ll put it out there, just because for me that was a genius collision of somebody that wanted to completely upturn a very busty old genre and inject it with something completely new in a brilliant way, and that’s what we’re all trying to do,’ she tells me.
No doubt, there are young Brown girls across the country who feel as though they don’t quite… fit, but Syal is clear that, just like for herself, that’s their ‘superpower’.
As our conversation winds to a close, I can’t help but wonder what it meant to have her parents believe in her from day one, long before she’d even landed her first gig.
The ones who now form the spine of her memoir and the reason she’s ‘sitting here today’.
With her warm humour, she quips: ‘They could see that I was absolutely obsessed and they figured: “If we push you to go and become a pharmacist, you’re going to be a really bad one. You might kill someone one day when you write the wrong prescription because your heart’s not in it.”’
Vigilauntie: A Memoir – Innit? by Meera Syal is out in hardback, ebook and audio on 3rd September (W&N, £22) and Meera stars in Lucy Kirkwood’s The Children at Lyric Theatre Hammersmith, September 2 – October 3.