David Morrissey

David was born and spent the early part of his life in the Kensington district of Liverpool. As Kensington underwent a housing redevelopment programme his family settled in nearby Knotty Ash.

He started acting at the Everyman Youth Theatre in Hope Street, Liverpool and made an auspicious debut, aged 16, in the acclaimed Channel 4 TV drama series One Summer, written by Willie Russell about two Liverpool runaways. Following completion of RADA studies, he was with the Royal Shakespeare Company for two years, then at the National Theatre.

In a career spanning over twenty years David has starred in a number of high profile TV productions and films including Blackpool, State of Play, The Deal (playing Gordon Brown), Hilary and Jackie, Captain Corelli's Mandolin, Born Romantic and most recently Basic Instinct 2. He has also directed the dramas Sweet Revenge, Bring Me Your Love and A Secret Audience.

For our project David has agreed to be interviewed about his early acting career at the Everyman Youth Theatre and this will appear here soon. He has also kindly donated a photograph taken of him and his mother outside his parent's home in Kensington, prior to making his first Holy Communion, and reflects on this period of his life below.

Off to church

"This picture was taken in 1971 in Seldon Street, Kensington. It shows my Mum, Joan, and I standing by our car just before I headed off for Sacred Heart Church to make my First Holy Communion. I'm not sure who took the picture, probably my Nan.

Everything in it has great significance to me. The curtains, the number plate on the car, the boarded up shop. The pearls. The fag."

45 Seldon Street

"My family had lived in that house for years, from the turn of the century probably. My Nan had been married there. Years later someone sent me a photo of her on her wedding day, aged about 21 in the back yard surrounded by generations of my relatives, most of which I never met, but who had, no doubt traipsed in and out of that front door behind me hundreds of times.

It had three rooms downstairs. The front room behind me was considered my Mum and Dad's room really and had their TV in it. Then there was the back room, which was really my Nan's room and that led onto a Kitchen.

Upstairs there were three bedrooms. My two elder brothers shared one, My Nan and my sister shared another, and then my Mum and Dad's bedroom, which I also slept in.

It seems inconceivable to me now that we all lived in that space. I can't imagine how the adults had a bath for example. Us kids just had a tin bath in the back kitchen, but how did they manage?

It wasn't always harmonious. But somehow it seemed to work, and at least everyone else in the street were living the same way. We had some good friends there and I was always in other people's houses as well as my own."

Knotty Ash

"Not long after this picture was taken we all moved to a house on a brand new estate in Knotty Ash. Four bedrooms and a bathroom!! Even a downstairs loo! And a garden. Which was full of builders clay when we moved in, but with a lot of digging from my Dad and tender loving care from my Mum it became quite a reasonable football pitch, come tennis court, come cricket ground."

Kensington

"I have good memories of Seldon Street though. As the bulldozers moved in and took away the surrounding streets it opened up a giant playground for us, We'd build dens out of the debris, battle fields and castles, until inevitably the big JCBs got closer and closer to our own house and we all had to go.

The move was welcomed by all of us. We needed to move and besides we didn't have a choice. But my Mum must have had mixed emotions about it - great to have some space and a bathroom, but she'd been born here, went to school here, survived the war here, courted, married and had four kids. I guess the promise of inside plumbing and visions of mowing your own lawn were enough for her to march into the future without too much of a backward glance."