Kitty McGeever played the first regular blind character in a British soap opera. A stand-up comedian before she joined Emmerdale, McGeever had type 1 diabetes diagnosed in her late teens and lost her sight in her thirties, so she brought an undoubted authenticity to Lizzie Lakely, whom she played for four years from 2009 to 2013.
Her health broke down as she cared for her son, Felix, who was born two months prematurely in 2001 and had heart and lung problems. “They’d think he was going to die on a certain day and then he wouldn’t,” she said. “They would say I should consider withdrawing [life] support. . . a week later he’d be eating chocolate pudding and laughing, and I’d be left thinking, what if I had said yes?”
Felix lived for 15 months. She stayed with him in hospital for a year, suffered from stress, went blind and required a kidney transplant. In spite of all this, she performed a new stand-up routine in which she talked about her blindness. She was then approached by the Emmerdale producer, Gavin Blyth, to develop the role of Lizzie in the soap. Other characters took pity on Lizzie, but, right from the outset, Lizzie took advantage of them. McGeever said she was delighted to be challenging stereotypes.
Born Catherine Jane Mitchell in Leeds in 1966, she had a traumatic childhood. Her younger sister died when McGeever was five and her mother had a nervous breakdown. McGeever found solace in acting. She wanted to be either an actress or a nun and settled on the former, although she worked in a factory before going to Rada in London. McGeever was her grandmother’s name. She had a few small film and television roles in the 1990s and appeared in the National Theatre production of Brassed Off. She married Lee Taylor in 1999 but their marriage broke down after the death of their son.
She refused to be dispirited. She wore Vivienne Westwood outfits and drank Bollinger champagne. “I remember meeting someone who was supposed to help me adapt to being blind and I asked how you go about buying clothes,” she said. “She told me: ‘What you have to do is stick with beige — just to be on the safe side’ . . . I thought, there’s no way I’m living a life in beige. I’d rather die.”
Advertisement
Kitty McGeever, actress, was born on October 15 1966. She died from kidney failure on August 16, 2015, aged 48