This week, Kristin chats with Jane Shepperd, who left a high-level nursing career at 34 to go to drama school. After several years of success in acting, including performing in the West End and stints on successful TV programmes like The Office, Jane changed her focus once again towards helping other actors land their dream roles as an agent.
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On The Second Chapter, founder of Slackline Productions, Kristin Duffy, chats with women who started the second (or third… or fifth!) chapter in their careers and lives, after 35. You’ll find inspiring stories, have a few laughs, and maybe even be motivated to turn the page on your own second chapter!
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Transcript
From Nurse to Actor to Agent, Jane Shepperd
This week, Kristin chats with Jane Shepperd, who left a high-level nursing career at 34 to go to drama school. After several years of success in acting, including performing in the West End and stints on successful TV programmes like The Office, Jane changed her focus once again towards helping other actors land their dream roles as an agent.
Kristin/The Second Chapter: [:Jane: [:Kristin/The Second Chapter: [:Jane: [:Kristin/The Second Chapter: [:So what's been keeping you so busy?
Jane: [:And one on top of the other, which was great that made us busy. It's been patchy inevitably, but we have managed to maintain that momentum with a good chunk of our list. And now that the road to releasing lockdown is underway, we are hearing about theatre productions. People are beginning to plan again, and whilst dates have been pushed back further and further, others are actually biting the bullet and going for it.
And so that aspect of things is coming back as well now, which is very encouraging. Having said that, we have lost, we've had to make one member of staff redundant and we have had to reduce the size of our lists because we didn't have the manpower within the team to be able to manage the full list, which was incredibly sad and very stressful.
So it hasn't been without its problems, but there is now at least some positive light at the end of the tunnel. We're hopeful.
Kristin/The Second Chapter: [:It's just, it's a weird thing to think about life resuming as quote unquote normal.
Jane: [:s very much listening to the [:Kristin/The Second Chapter: [:Jane: [:A medical or caring world in some respect. And I didn't really want to, I wanted to be an actress, but I didn't have the money or the confidence, I think back in those days. And it was a long time ago there weren't drama school degrees, you had to audition and get in. And I had no hope in hell of getting a grant in my own right to go to drama school. And so I went okay, what's the next best thing? Well, I suppose I could be a nurse, so I. Went and did a degree in nursing and it was a science-based degree. Whereas a lot of them are bachelor of arts.
This was a BSC honours degree and it was much more intensive on the science side of things. And I did my degree at St. Thomas's Hospital in London and Southbank. It was a four- year degree to fit on all the practical. And it was great. Actually, I did enjoy it. But I always enjoyed the practical side of things more than the academic side of things.
Kristin/The Second Chapter: [:Jane: [:And then I was offered a job, actually, a more permanent job to be quite senior actually on, or I was very young on the the AIDS unit. They were setting up at St. Thomas's. It was back in the. Mid eighties when obviously AIDS was becoming known about and was becoming increasingly more prevalent.
love. So I left Tommy's and [:So it was acute nursing. It was critical care. It was recovery, but we doubled as a high dependency unit and we would not infrequently have ventilated cases when ITU were full and so on. So it was quite well, it was quite intensive and it was one-to-one nursing. And I loved that.
Particularly the more challenging, interesting cases where people were really very unwell. So yeah, I, I was lucky. I had an interesting time and I climbed the ladder in this. And I ended up as the senior sister in charge of that unit and did that for about five years. And then I set up the postoperative pain service in Guilford which was to deal with intravenous patient controlled analgesia pumps, PCAs, and epidural infusion
[:And I did that for. My last year in nursing before I changed career for the first time.
Kristin/The Second Chapter: [:Jane: [:[:[:[:[:[:[:[:[:[:[:[:[:[:[:[:[:[:[:[:[:[:[:[:[:[:[:[:[:[:[:[:[:[:[:[:[:[:[:[:[:[:[:[:[:[:[:[:[:[:[:[:[:[:[:[:[:[:[:[:[:[:[:[:[:[:[:[:[:[:[:[:[:[:[:[:[:[:[:[:[:[:[:[:[:[:[:[:[:[:[:[:[:[:[:[:[:[:[:[:[:[:[:[:[:[:[:[:[:[:[:[:[:[:[:[:[:[:[:[:[:[:[:[:[:[:[:[:[:[:[:[:[:[:[:[:[:[:[:[:[:[:[:[:[:[:Jane: Well, thank you. Thank you for making it such a joy and all the very best to you too. It's extremely exciting. And thank you for inviting me as, as I say,
Kristin/The Second Chapter: thank you very much. It was really nice chatting with you.
Jane: and you too. Take care.
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