Corrie's Sue Cleaver on twist of fate that led to her finding birth mum

Sue Cleaver is in the kitchen of her Manchester home, her pampered Staffordshire bull terrier “gorgeous George Paws” lying beside her. Sun streams through the plantation shutters, while in the garden, laundry billows in the breeze.

The ITV soap star – for almost a quarter of a century Coronation Street’s straight-talking Eileen Grimshaw – is just back from a trip in her touring caravan with her second husband, the show’s “lighting gaffer” Brian Owen.

“Gorgeous George is a rescue, he’s about 13,” she says. And smiling, adds: “I felt real joy getting up this morning. The sun was shining, and it was so nice hanging the clothes out in the garden.”

It’s a scene of domestic bliss and the antithesis of the bombshell memoir the star launched last week. Courageously candid and with all the drama of a soap opera, it could have come straight from a screenwriter’s pen.

From her adoption at birth and early childhood in Morayshire, to going off the rails as a teenager, becoming pregnant by a man twice her age and having an abortion at 17, to the chance discovery that her birth mother was married to one of her early co-stars and was a close friend of Corrie’s Helen Worth who plays Gail Platt.

But for Sue, what is past is past. “I am more interested in being grateful for where I am at the present moment,” she reveals.

Suddenly, her gratitude for simple joys makes sense. “When you are in the moment you don’t overthink.”

Overthinking, she explains, is the root cause of her problems, her sense of not belonging, of not being good enough and feeling “other” and the loneliness, the need to fit in, and the recklessness and self-sabotage that ensued.

Eventually turning to therapy, later qualifying as a psychotherapist, she says it was Scotland-born Sydney Banks, the late, world-renowned teacher and author, and his Three Principles approach that brought lasting change.

Now, at 61, she wants her life – and how she has turned it around – to be a beacon for others. She hopes her book, titled A Work in Progress, will light the way.

TV Loose Women guest Sue, who came ninth in 2022’s I’m A Celebrity Get Me Out Of Here, was adopted as a newborn by Freda and the late John Cleaver – who also had a five-year-old son, Paul.

“I was aware of this even as a very young child,” she says. “I made assumptions that I didn’t belong based on what other people said or things I’d seen. We base our reality on thoughts that are often not true.

“I remember when I first went to school my mum said don’t tell anyone you are adopted. She didn’t want me to feel other and she didn’t want cruel children saying something that would upset me.

“But my thinking interpreted that as there being something wrong with me.”

Despite being loved and “never made to feel lesser” by her devoted adoptive family, she writes: “Not knowing who I was or where I came from added another layer of uncertainty about myself, which has underlined my life for as long as I can remember, until relatively recently.”

Sue, mum to Elliott, 28, the son she shares with her first husband, actor James Quinn, explains: “It was that feeling of not being enough. I spent so much of my life trying to fit in, to fit into somebody else’s version of what you should be. I got confused between belonging and fitting in.”

She moved aged seven with her family from Hemel Hempstead to Moray where her father landed a job at Gordonstoun. “We lived on the school estate, which was huge, over two miles long, and it was wonderful,” she says.

“I’d have my breakfast then go out on my bike. Mum would give me a sandwich and say, ‘Be back at five o’clock’. The only rule I had was not to go to the beach or go near the lake, which I did all the time because my brother – who I worshipped – had built a little rowing boat. I’d always come back covered in pond weed.”

At age 12, everything changed when her father took a job at a school in Manchester and the family moved again, her brother remaining at Gordonstoun.

“My teens were probably the worst time in my life,” she reveals. “I tried on personalities like coats, I’d look at other people and think this is who I need to be, that’s what I need to believe in, it was a really mixed-up sense of self.”

Sue with son Elliott after being voted out of I’m a Celebrity.

Sue went off the rails at school and began to make bad choices.

By 15 she had a steady boyfriend but left him for his older brother, a sailor in the Navy. At 16 she quit school with no qualifications and moved to Plymouth to live with him in a bedsit.

She eventually moved back to Manchester to live with her parents. But after hanging out with an older crowd at a local wine bar, she ended up pregnant at 17 by a 35-year-old man.

Knowing she wouldn’t be able to cope with a baby, she booked herself in for an abortion. She says: “I was in absolute turmoil. I eventually told my mum. I said ‘This has happened, I’m going to the hospital on this date, can I have a lift and can we not tell Dad’. I don’t think we ever spoke about it again, but that was my choice.”

In 1986, aged 23, Sue won a small part in the play Oedipus at Manchester’s Royal Exchange Theatre where her co-star, Michael N Harbour, told the stage manager: “She’s the spitting image of my wife when I met her.”

Later, at a get-together with the cast, Michael asked Sue where she was born and her date of birth. The answers she gave shook him to the core. He called his wife, Lesley, and said: “I’ve found her.”

Sue’s birth mother, Lesley Sizer Grieve, had given her up for adoption when she was a 17-year-old single mum, five years before meeting Michael.

Lesley and Michael went on to have two daughters, Kate and Emma. He took Sue to meet Lesley at a hotel. Reliving the moment in the book she reveals how they, “Hugged and then we talked… and drank and ate until dawn.”

Sue’s ever-supportive adoptive mum, now nearly 90, forged a friendship with Lesley before her sad death in February 2020.

In another incredible twist, Sue tells how Corrie co-star Helen Worth was once flat-mates with Lesley. “She knew Lesley had this child [she’d given up],” Sue says. “And Helen is Godmother to one of my half-sisters!”

In yet another bizarre twist, she reveals both her half sisters are in the entertainment business.

“Kate is a voice actress who played Wendy in the children’s show Bob The Builder, and so when Elliot was small, she was in my living room all the time,” she reveals.

“I have always known I’ve felt different,” she says. “I don’t think I really realised I belonged until my 50s.

“It has taken a long time to get completely comfortable in my skin.

“I hope women will take something from the book that applies to them. We have so much more in common than we don’t have in common. We are all awesome, and I want all women to know they are unique and special, and that they belong, whatever they believe about themselves.

“We have the keys to our own prisons. Sydney Banks said we are only one thought away from happiness, we just don’t realise it.”

‘Do what brings you joy’

Sue Cleaver has a message for 60- something women like her who have been conditioned by society to “accept their lot and not make waves”.

According to the Corrie star, women in middle or later life still have so much to give and enjoy and need to start a new conversation about issues like sacrificing their own needs for the sake of others and not talking about their feelings.

Sue says she began making changes in her 40s, without which she might have turned down opportunities like I’m A Celebrity Get Me Out Of Here or recently returning to the live stage in Sister Act after a 30-year hiatus.

“It was at a time when I noticed a lot of friends of similar ages saying, ‘Oh well, we are in the twilight now’. I was saying, ‘God, no! I need to do things for me’.

Everything, she says, changed for her when she discovered Syd Banks’s “Three Ps”. Sue explains: “The Three Principles is an understanding of how we work as humans through mind, consciousness and thought.”

According to Sue, it’s about understanding that emotion is created by our thoughts.

Sue tells P.S. readers: “The most important thing in this period of our lives is to find something that gives us joy. The past is dead thoughts: if you like the memories hang on to them; if you don’t, let them go.”

A Work In Progress by Sue Cleaver is published in hardback by Bloomsbury Publishing, £20