New blow for Sheridan Smith as pay for cancelled play Opening Night is slashed but she’s still raking in five figures
Sheridan Smith will suffer a big financial blow after it was revealed her West End play is to close early – but we can reveal that she earned around £21,000-a-week last year as one of the nation’s best-loved acting talents.
The hugely talented actress is currently starring in West End play Opening Night, which follows a theatre company’s preparations to stage a major new play on Broadway.
But poor ticket sales have led to the production ending two months early.
And that will mean Sheridan will lose out of two months’ worth of pay – as she’s paid by the performance.
However, she does have some financial good cheer.
Sheridan runs a company to take in cash from her telly work called Barking Mad Productions Ltd.
And her most recent annual accounts sent to Companies House this week show that she’s paid £222,445 in Corporation Tax for 2023.
The tax burden is based on her earnings of being around £1.1m over that period.
Sheridan’s books also showed she had £239,538 in cash at the time of filing to the government department for the 12 months to the end of April 2023.
The mum-of-one is widely acknowledged as the best actress of her generation and has starred in dramas such as Cilla, Mrs Biggs and The C Word.
Sheridan is raising her lad Billy as a single parent after she split with her son’s father, Jamie Horn.
In November 2021, she was involved in a high-speed car crash, which followed four years of what she described as “hell”.
She had been dealing with panic attacks since 2011, which she realised was a battle with depression and anxiety culminating in a breakdown after her dad Colin died of cancer in 2016.
The Lincolnshire-born star also lost her brother Julian to cancer when he was 18 and she was eight.
She appeared in No Return – an ITV drama about a mum whose teenage son is arrested for a crime committed while they are on a family holiday.
At the same time, she was on the box in The Teacher on Channel 5.
After playing Ronnie Biggs’ wife Charmain in 2012’s Mrs Biggs, which won her a Bafta, Sheridan had a decade of superlative TV roles.
She played Cilla Black in Cilla, then real-life journalist Lisa Lynch – who wrote a blog about her cancer – in The C Word.
She also appeared in The Moorside, based on the disappearance of nine-year-old Shannon Matthews.
