Simon has spent much of this century on screen. “As well as ‘black actor’, I don’t like it when people say you’re a ‘theatre actor’ or a ‘TV actor’. They all have a different discipline. I did get concerned about being known as a ‘theatre actor’, so I decided to take a break and do some TV.” It was
Blake’s 7, in which she played Dayna, that first made her name in the early 1980s and she returned to primetime in series such as Lewis, Merlin and Death in Paradise. “Then I missed the old theatre muscles – and out of the blue came this offer.”