Rosie Jenkins’ double life is a busy one. I had to catch her on the reception desk at Allenbridge Group Plc because that evening she was going to Manchester to continue acting in Northern Broadside’s production of The Canterbury Tales.
“I always get a very warm welcome whenever I’m coming back and a sad goodbye whenever I’m off again," says Rosie of the others at Allenbridge. After a decade of working there, they’ve grown accustomed to seeing her hit the road – once for as long as ten months.”
Rosie is PA to Group Managing Director, Anthony Yadgaroff, but when she’s finished sending the e-mails and making the calls, she gets her script out, because her heart is in the theatre. Sometimes while she’s making notes on a new script and highlighting her lines, Anthony looks over her shoulder. “He finds the whole process exciting, I think,” she says.
Growing up in a performing family – her parents are both classical musicians and her father an opera singer – Rosie caught the show business bug early on. She graduated from Guildford School of Acting in 1997 and counts as career highlights roles in Sir Alan Aychkbourn’s How the Other Half Lives (2009), Whistle Down the Wind (1999-2000) opposite Glen Carter and the title role in Sugar (2005), where she met her fiancé.
Like many actors, Rosie did her time waiting tables and working in bars between gigs on stage before landing a temping job on reception at Allenbridge. “The myths are true,” she says, “Actors do spend a lot of time waitressing. I don’t know if I could do that now.”
While she was working as a waitress soon after moving to London from Alton, someone suggested that she register with a temping agency. She claims that she could only type with one finger and didn’t know anything about computers at the time. “I didn’t know how to send an email,” she says.
With the support of her colleagues, Rosie soon found her feet and when Anthony asked her to stay on, she accepted the offer without hesitation. “I am often away acting for months at a time but Anthony has always, very generously, kept my position open. He occasionally employs a temp to cover me until I have finished on stage,” she says.
Sometimes those temps are other actors Rosie recommends, saving Allenbridge the fee they would usually pay a temping agency and allowing her to help her friends in the industry.
So, how separate are her acting and office lives? Rosie admits that there have been times when she’s been away and has not known where the document Anthony is hunting for is. Generally, though, she either delegates or tries not to leave any work outstanding before she goes to pursue her acting.
“Once I’ve gone away to do my acting, I’m pretty focused on that…I had to learn a huge amount of dialogue for The Clerk’s Tale (one of The Canterbury Tales for which Rosie has received critical acclaim) and a lot of music and it all has to be committed to memory and you can’t have anything clouding that.”
She has told Anthony in the past to feel free to replace her with a full-time PA, but he won’t have it. She reckons he enjoys maintaining links with the creative world by employing actors and musicians. He always asks about her recalls for second auditions and regularly goes, along with others from Allenbridge, to see her perform.
She says, “After ten years I know him very well. He’s become a friend as well as a boss and I know the way he ticks. I know the way he likes to do things. So, it kind of works out well for both of us.”
