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“The premise of the book, the reason for doing it, was to give a bit of hope to people, especially people suffering with their mental health,” Sid tells me, a clear note of frustration in his voice. “It was to show people at the bottom that you can come from nothing and achieve things…not to drag up old news.”
The book, From Rags To Ricky, certainly does that. Owen’s extraordinary, Dickensian story takes him from child thief to soap stardom and beyond. Born David Sutton in Islington, North London, Sid was the son of a violent, abusive armed robber father, and a barmaid mother who died when he was just seven-years-old. A chubby child – the “Sid” came from his nickname, Steak & Kidney Sidney” – he was lured into a life of petty crime by his three elder brothers.
“It was council estate living then, day by day,” he says. “It was survival. We grew up struggling, trying to live on benefits. It wasn’t so easy to get handouts, you had to learn to think on your feet. Crime was all around me; crime was all I knew.”
Acting was his salvation. Without it, he says “I might have got a job in a bank, but the likelihood was I’d have been robbing it.”
Three giant characters changed his life – the drama coach Anna Scher, Cockney comedian Mike Reid, who played his EastEnders screen father Frank Butcher, and movie star Al Pacino. “Mike Reid felt sorry for me, he took me under his wing and that was what I craved,” Sid, 49, recalls. “He advised me and looked out for me.”
Owen was sixteen and living in a squat when he got the part. The BBC1 soap became his surrogate family. “It was like a whole big family unit. It gave me that structure, that make-believe family to keep me normal.
Nick Berry was like my wise older brother.
“Mike was special. He was hilarious to work with but on screen he was always frustrated with Ricky or angry with him. He used to go red in the face, he was so into it. It looked so real. It was terrifying.
“Once he had to slap me, but Mike arched his hand so I wouldn’t get the full impact. Even so when he arched it over by ear I almost went deaf and was seeing stars…but it looked so good on screen.
“Mike left us too soon, he was 67 when we lost him…it was such a shame.”
Sid misses EastEnders but says, “The schedule was very hard. I was doing it from the age of 16, you feel like you’re missing out on your teens and your 20s. My mates were travelling, I couldn’t. That’s why I left the first time. I came and went four and five times.”
The producers asked him back this year, but the dates clashed with his book. “I would go back, 100 percent,” he says. “It was a big part of my life; it was good to me. I’ll never forget it. The 90s were the glory days. It was the pinnacle for Ricky and Bianca” – played by Patsy Palmer.
“Our wedding got 22million viewers” – ten times more than the soap has pulled recently. “Back then you only had to fart and you were in the paper. There were a lot of fabricated stories…”
Anna Scher, whose theatre school was near his estate, opened the door for his career.
“She was my saviour,” says Sid. “She was affordable, poorer kids could enrol for 25p a week, and she had a genuine interest in troubled kids. Her classes helped me channel my energy and anger into acting and improvising. Anna let us swear which was a huge release. It takes you away from where you’re at.
“If I swore at home, my aunt would stick soap in my mouth.”
Sid lived with his maternal aunt Carol, but clashed with her other half; consequently he spent a lot of time with his friend’s family, the Wooders.
His first major acting high was playing Al Pacino’s screen son in the 1985 Hollywood movie Revolution when he was 13. “In one scene I get captured by the enemy, whipped by Donald Sutherland and tied to a cannon. It was eight or nine pages of dialogue and we shot the arse out of it for a week, freestyle and improvising. I got the part because I could improvise.
“That’s one of my proudest moments, that and all the memorable scenes with Patsy, the moving storyline about a still-born baby, deep stuff.”
New Yorker Pacino, who’d famously drank and smoked from an early age, was another good influence, disciplining Sid for running wild on the film set. “I had ADHD; he’d have a word in my ear to calm me down. He was fond of me.”
Owen says he has never been happier than he is now.
“As you get older, you don’t torture yourself. I don’t smoke or take drugs any more. I train four or five times a week. I run and I swim, nothing too tricky. An hour’s run or an hour’s swim. I cope better now. I’m a good cook and I’ve got an amazing girlfriend, Victoria.
“We’ve been together a year but we dated 23 years ago.”
She’d say my best attribute was my cooking, and my worst is snoring.”
Sid left EastEnders in 2012, but even now the spectre of Ricky Butcher hangs over him. “I get recognised every day,” he says. “I still get people shouting ‘Rickkayyyy!’, there’s nothing original. It’s crazy even abroad. It can get very touchy feely when people are drunk. It can be a bit intrusive; you learn to stay in control. All the repeats are on now, so it’s come full circle.
“It can happen anywhere. I was in panto in Bournemouth 20 years ago, having a pee, and a guy who was stood there, covered in blood with a copper interviewing him, turned to me and said, ‘Mate, can I have an autograph?’”
Little wonder Sid lived in France for twenty years. “I was a bit of a hermit,” he laughs. “But lockdown was okay for me because as an actor you can sit on your arse for months between jobs. It’s something you get used to.”
His ambition is to do “a good gangster movie or a good British crime drama TV series, like an English Sopranos, set in London. I’d always take Peaky Blinders over medical programmes.”
Sid has a home in Kent and a rented flat near London’s Tower Hill. A Celebrity MasterChef veteran, he relaxes by watching cooking shows, loves the comedy of Jimmy Carr and Ricky Gervais, and “all sorts of music”. But prod him and he talks about his love of reggae, Madness, and 80s stars like Bad Manners, the Style Council and Sham 69.
“Nick Berry got me into Sham,” he laughs. “They were heavy.” Some of those bands and their fans also had backgrounds in petty criminality.
Sid, who started stealing at the age of four, has no regrets and no remorse. “I did nothing that bad,” he says. “Otherwise, you’d know about it. I was never a hardened criminal.
“Back then, we were told we were problem children, now we’d get help. I come from a very mixed-up dysfunctional family and just being here today and getting through it and doing the right thing makes me feel proud.
“I’ve been lucky.”
- From Rags to Ricky by Sid Owen (Macmillan, £18.99) is out now
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