After three series across nine years, the last 70-minute episode of Happy Valley aired on Sunday, drawing in an average audience of 7.5 million viewers, according to the BBC’s overnight figures.

Reviewers from The Times, The Telegraph, the Daily Mail, the i and The Guardian all focused on the final showdown between Catherine and her nemesis, the murderer, sex offender and escaped convict Tommy Lee Royce, played by James Norton, as they gave it their highest rating.

The Times called their meeting at the kitchen table “exquisitely bleak” and “surely, Bafta-winning”.

But who is its creator Sally Wainwright?

Sally, 59, lives in a Cotswold village, near Oxford, although she has said she prefers Yorkshire and visits as often as she can.

Oxford Mail:

She's married to Ralph 'Austin' Sherlaw Johnson, an antiquarian sheet music dealer and son of the composer Robert Sherlaw Johnson.

The couple have two sons and own two Maine Coon cats.

Early in her career, Ms Wainwright worked as a playwright, and as a scriptwriter on the long-running radio serial drama The Archers.

In the 1990s, Wainwright began her television career, and, in 2000, created her first original drama series At Home with the Braithwaites about a woman who had secretly won the lottery. 

READ MORE: Happy Valley compared to real life as Oxford court reporter

Wainwright is known for her creation of the ITV drama series Scott and Bailey, a series about two female police officers, and Last Tango in Halifax.

Wainwright based the plot of her series Last Tango in Halifax on the story of her mother, who was widowed in 2001. Her mother, Dorothy, moved to Oxfordshire to live with her daughter and rediscovered a lost love via Friends Reunited.

She is also the creator of the 2019 HBO and BBC1 television series Gentleman Jack. 

It is a drama about the 19th-century Yorkshire landowner, diarist, and open lesbian, Anne Lister, played by Suranne Jones, and Lister's courtship of Ann Walker, played by Sophie Rundle.

 

 

Sally was born in 1963 in Huddersfield, West Yorkshire, and brought up in Sowerby Bridge where she attended Triangle Church of England Primary School and Sowerby Bridge High School. 

She read English at York University and has said that she had always wanted to write.

From the time she was nine years old, she wanted to write for Coronation Street. 

While at university Wainwright took an original play called Hanging On to the Edinburgh Festival and found an agent for her writing in the process.

Meanwhile, she worked as a bus driver and in 2006 called on the experience for drama series Jane Hall, which depicts the life of a female bus driver in London.

When she was 24, she left the driving job after she started writing for The Archers and Coronation Street followed.

Ms Wainwright says that her strong yet flawed female characters are "almost real" to her and arrive "fully formed" in her imagination.

Oxford Mail:

She likes to control the television that is created and has done some directing and producing of her own work partly to ensure the scenery and dialogue reflects Yorkshire. 

Wainwright had Sarah Lancashire in mind when she wrote Happy Valley.

Wainwright wrote and directed a two-hour drama special for BBC One entitled To Walk Invisible: The Bronte Sisters, which aired on BBC One in 2016 and in the US in 2017.

Its subject is the Brontë family, particularly the relationship the three sisters, Anne, Emily and Charlotte, had with their brother, Branwell.

While working on the drama, Wainwright said "I am thrilled beyond measure that I've been asked by the BBC to bring to life these three fascinating, talented, ingenious Yorkshire women."

 

 

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