Michelle Collins

Michelle Danielle Collins is a British actress best known for her roles on television in the BBC soap opera EastEnders, as Cindy Beale, Coronation Street as Stella Price, and BBC dramas Sunburn and Two Thousand Acres of Sky. At one time, she was also a TV presenter on The Word. Born in Hackney, east London, to an English father and Welsh mother in 1962, Collins and her older sister were brought up by their mother. Collins trained at the Royal Court Activists and Cockpit Youth Theatre from the age of fourteen, and then Kingsway Princeton College where she studied drama and theatre at O/A... level. After her exams, she landed a role in Bulgakov’s The Crimson Island at The Gate Theatre, directed by Lou Stein. Her career changed direction when, having performed in the video for the Squeeze song "Up the Junction", she joined Mari Wilson and The Wilsations as the backing singer, "Candide". The band spent eighteen months touring the country, working with artists such as Marc Almond, Level 42, Altered Images and Kid Creole and the Coconuts.
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