Tracy-Ann Oberman: ‘Getting older is fantastic’

Actor and playwright Tracy-Ann Oberman – whose TV credits include EastEnders, Doctor Who and Friday Night Dinner – says she reached her peak at 50.

Speaking to The Big Issue for the Letter To My Younger Self feature, Oberman said she wished she could let her 16-year-old self know she shouldn’t worry about the ageing process.

“From where I’m standing now I’d say to my younger self, getting older is going to be fantastic,” she said. “You’re going to feel more in your body, more easy in your skin. You’re going to feel more attractive, more able to do anything.

“It’s going to be liberating because you’re going to reach your peak at 50. And it’s just going to feel like it’s getting better and better. The opportunities, the self-understanding, the self-awareness, the dressing, the makeup, the hair, all of it.”

In a career that’s spanned almost three decades, Oberman has appeared in a wide range of comedy and drama series on the television, in productions in the West End, and in more than 600 radio plays. She’s also written for The Guardian, The Jewish Chronicle and Red magazine.

While Oberman expressed pride in her achievements, especially having come from an immigrant Jewish family in which acting was not one of the traditional career paths, she also said she sometimes wishes she’d taken a little more time off.

“I lived in fear that every job might be my last job,” she admitted. “And I was so driven by needing to work all the time and make a shilling.

“I was very nervous about how things would work out and was this or that the right move – the older me is much more fearless. I would tell my younger self not to panic, you can take time off and nurture yourself and be nice to yourself.

“When I think of all the weddings and parties I missed over the years because I was working…  I look back now and think, it would have been OK to have said no to some of those jobs.”

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One of the developments Oberman said she was most pleased about in the 40 years since she was a teenager was the advances in hair conditioners.

“The mid-’80s was not a good time for conditioner,” she explained. “I was walking around like Aslan through the desert with the most dry, arid, curly hair waiting for a miracle. I had to wait till the 2000s for an answer, for John Frieda to come into my life.

“My daughter has curly hair and she looks like a Pre-Raphaelite mermaid. That was always my dream, but instead I looked like a mangy old lion.”

Read the full interview with Tracy-Ann Oberman in The Big Issue magazine, on the streets from February 13.  

The new book Letter to My Younger Self: Inspirational Women is out now, you can order it here.