Kathleen Claire Kelly was nicknamed Kick from before she was even born. The moniker was based on her activity in the womb and later, she was given the initial to almost form the word -- well, the first two, at least. Her surname beginning with a K was merely a helpful coincidence. Kick was the second child born to Simon and Caroline, and both of her parents are in the medical field. (Simon is an orthodontic surgeon, and Caroline is a child psychiatrist.) Her siblings, Matthew and Therese, are an athlete and musician respectively, so each of the Kelly children have claimed the limelight in some way in their adulthood. Kick is probably the most famous of the three of them, which isn’t something that always sits comfortably with her. As an actress who appeared on one of the most beloved television series of all time in the UK, she ruled Saturday nights as Rose Tyler for some years, and she’s discovered that the public don’t forget very easily -- if at all.

This is something that a lot of actresses say and only some of them mean, but Kick didn’t seek fame from birth or anything like that. She didn’t step onto a set until she was nineteen, and even then it was out of persuasion rather than any real desire to act. She was scouted in a shopping centre in London, and invited to audition for an advert for breakfast cereal. She wasn’t keen, but her mother convinced her it was a “once in a lifetime” opportunity and, given the state that her relationship with her mother had lapsed into at that point, Kick would probably have leapt through rings of fire or climbed through a tiger-filled jungle to please her mum. To cut a long story short, she won the part of “Smiling Girl” in the advert and that was the start of it all.

Kick grew up in Bexleyheath. She had a reasonably normal childhood; her parents divorced when she was nine, but her mother had already left the family to move in with her new boyfriend and his children by then. Choosing which parent to live with was a decision Kick agonised over, but eventually her brother made it for her. Matthew said he wanted to live with their father and the woman he was about to make his second wife, and once Kick heard that, she insisted that she would as well. She wasn’t even particularly close with her big brother as a kid, but she couldn’t stand the idea of having to squeeze into some established family and stick out like a sore thumb until she could get away and live independently. She also knew it hurt her mum to have the three of them stay with their father, and maybe that played into it too. Kick didn’t get a thrill out of hurting her mother, but it was almost like revenge. She felt like she’d been abandoned by the woman she loved most, so she wasn’t about to reconcile with her and pretend everything was fine when she didn’t believe it was. They’ve had a difficult relationship ever since. Sometimes Kick wants nothing more than to make her mother proud, and sometimes she wants to throw things across rooms and scream because she’s so angry with her. It’s ironic that a child psychiatrist didn’t know how to make her own daughter love her in a normal way.

Kick left school at seventeen with just her GCSEs and a third of an A-level course completed. The fact was, she didn’t want to study any more. She started working as a ‘hostess’ at a steakhouse that shall go unnamed in central London. She made decent money, and believes she deserved it. The job was awful. She was hostess and waitress and object of lust and petting from most of the customers, dirty old men who only came along to ogle the female staff and (so it was snidely whispered in the kitchen) probably couldn’t even chew the steak with their real teeth. Kick learnt quickly to let them feel her up in exchange for high tips which none of the hostesses split with the other staff. She began squirrelling money away for a ‘rainy day’, or, more accurately, for the opportunity to escape. She stayed rent-free with her dad and his wife and her younger sister, and when the chance to star in a cereal advert came up, she nailed it. And the rest could be history.

In 2004, she appeared in a film for the first time. Layer Cake, based off the novel of the same name, was not Oscar material, but it was watchable, and if she accidentally catches it showing late at night on Channel 4 or somewhere similar, Kick doesn’t cringe at her performance in it. Alright, she wasn’t a well-honed, shining example of a wonderful actress. Honestly, she still isn’t. But at twenty-one years old and as the definition of a novice, she reckons she didn’t do too badly. A year later she got the break that she’d been praying for ever since she started working at the steakhouse. When she was unveiled as Rose Tyler in the revived series of “Doctor Who”, she was called a “new face”, a “previously undiscovered talent”. She felt like phoning up editors every time she read something along those lines -- like shouting down the telephone, “I’m not a breakout anything! I was in Layer Cake!” But of course, she didn’t. She soon learned there was no such thing as bad publicity.

She appeared on and off in “Doctor Who” until 2013, when she made what she believes will probably be her final appearance in the show. Although -- never say never. She’s extremely grateful to the show-runners, old and new, who keep bringing her back, and to fans of the programme, who seem to like her well enough even after all this time. (Or so she assumes -- she has no desire to go digging in the depths of the internet to find out their real opinions.) In the years while she was featuring on the serial, she appeared in a few other things too. She had a small part in Starter for 10, and played Sally Lockhart in the first two adaptations of Philip Pullman’s Sally Lockhart Quartet (the second two were never made, for various reasons). Her most notable role from that time was probably Julia Flyte in Brideshead Revisited.

Since she wrapped on “Doctor Who” for (presumably) the last time, she’s continued working fairly steadily. Kick knows she’s lucky in this regard. To not be a jobbing actor when you’re an actor at all is a blessing. In 2013, she appeared as Irene Adler in the American reimagining of the Sherlock stories, and later this year she’ll appear in a major film franchise for the first time, when she appears as Cressida in the last two of the Hunger Games movies. That ought to be a new experience in and of itself, the press tours and the premieres and everything in between. To date, Kick’s career is going pretty well, and she can’t help but feel that maybe, at thirty-one years old, it’s turning another corner and entering a new phase yet again.