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Award-winning actor Joanna Scanlan has returned to º£½ÇÉçÇø Leicester (DMU), more than 30 years after leaving her job as a drama lecturer, to receive an honorary degree. 

The 63-year-old taught at DMU for five years in the late 1980s and early 1990s, covering the period where the institution, then known as Leicester Polytechnic, became a university. 

But, more than three decades on, having established herself as an acclaimed star of TV, film and stage, Joanna returned to DMU and stood before hundreds of students at the university’s summer graduation ceremonies, to accept an Honorary Doctorate. 

She said: “I came to Leicester in the late 1980s, to teach drama on the BA in Performing Arts. I was not much more than an undergraduate myself. 

“I was very sad, very disillusioned. I had been thoroughly rejected by the acting profession. I could have framed that abject failure as the truth of my identity but this university saved me from that. 

“In the five years I spent at DMU, something very important happened to me: teaching turned into learning. I learned from my students and from my brilliant fellow lecturer that there is no distinction between teaching and doing. All of us both teach and do every day.” 

Speaking afterwards, Joanna, who won the BAFTA Award for Best Actress in a Leading Role for her performance in the 2020 film After Love, said she found herself using everything she had taught in the classroom for her star-making role as press officer Terri Coverley in political satire The Thick of It. 

She explained that the process of creating the show involved an interplay between writing and character-based improvising, something she had herself taught students at DMU. 

She said: “While I was here teaching, one of my courses was Stanislavsky and I worked a lot on creating characters with students through Stanislavsky and what we did in The Thick of It dovetailed perfectly with that, absolutely perfectly. 

“Even yesterday, I was working, and I was very consciously applying the same processes I taught 30 years ago, the same ones I have used throughout my career.” 

In the three decades since leaving DMU as a lecturer, Joanna has won a formidable reputation as an actor and writer, having co-created dark satirical NHS drama , which she starred and co-wrote with  and .  

The series earned her a  nomination for Best Female Performance in a Comedy and a BAFTA Television Craft nomination for screenwriting in both 2011 and 2013. 

In cinema, she has played a variety of roles in films like Girl with a Pearl Earring (2003), Notes on a Scandal (2006), The Invisible Woman (2013), Bridget Jones’s Baby (2016), and more recently Wicked Little Letters (2023). 

Joanna said the urge to perform was fired within her from an early age.  

She said: “I first went on stage aged four and for me it was instantly intoxicating. It was about preferring being in the world of make believe. 

“Creativity is an engagement with the imagination. It is something we don’t associate with the everyday. It elevates us, as something transcendental, out of our everyday lives at that engagement whether it is with pottery, cooking, singing dancing, that experience is something essential for all of us as human beings.”