Sue Cleaver’s astonishing reconciliation with birth mum as she quits Coronation Street after 25 years

Coronation Street actress Sue Cleaver plays Eileen Grimshaw in the ITV soap (Image: ITV)

Coronation Street star Sue Cleaver met her birth mother under the most incredible circumstances.

The Eileen Grimshaw actress – who confirmed this week she is leaving the ITV soap after an incredible 25-year run – was adopted when she was just ten days old.

Just days after ringing in the New Year, she admitted it’s time for her to step back from the cobbles. Over the past 25 years, Sue’s character has been at the centre of some of the biggest storylines, including her son, Todd, fathering a child in his teens with Sarah Louise Platt.

“I’ve had 25 privileged years of working on Coronation Street,” Sue, 61, said in a statement shared with the media this week. She went on say “The door is still firmly open but as I reached my 60th year, I decided it was time to embrace change, look for new adventures and live fearlessly.”

Sue left GMB hosts Kate Garraway and Richard Madeley stunned over summer when she revealed the unlikely details of how she reunited with her birth family. Appearing on Good Morning Britain, she told how she was at drama school and auditioning when an actor told her “she was the double of his wife.”

She revealed the actor Michael Harper chatted to her at a dinner party and asked about her accent and from then he released she was his wife’s daughter.

Sue first spoke about the astonishing coincidence in an interview with the Mirror in September. In 1986, aged 23, Sue won a small part in the play Oedipus at Manchester’s Royal Exchange Theatre. But when her co-star Michael N Harbour saw her, he went white. He declared to the stage manager: “Oh my God, she’s the spitting image of my wife when I met her.”

Despite their age gap Sue and 41-year-old Michael became firm friends. Writing in her candid new memoir A Work in Progress, Sue says: “I was completely obsessed with him and fascinated by his stories about his family, I wasn’t sure why.”

One Sunday the cast got together for a lunch party and Michael started making fun of Sue’s Northern accent before asking where she was born and her date of birth. When she answered that she was actually born in Barnet, Greater London, not the North and that she was born on September 2, 1963, Michael immediately called his wife Lesley, announcing: ‘I’ve found her.’

It turned out that Sue’s birth mother Lesley Sizer Grieve had given her up for adoption when she was a 17 year-old single mum, five years before meeting Michael.

“It was almost like a love story,” Sue says ( Image: PR HANDOUT)

Sue (whose birth name was Claire Grieve) was adopted by a young couple Fred and John Cleaver and she went to live with them and their five year-old son Paul. Lesley and Michael meanwhile went on to have two teenage daughters who had no idea they had a half-sister. But Michael knew his wife had always wondered about her eldest child – the resemblance was so strong and the dates matched and he just knew he had found her.

Michael broke the news to Sue, telling her: ‘You are my wife’s daughter,’ and took her to meet Lesley in a hotel. Sue, best-known as Coronation Street’s feisty cab switchboard operator Eileen Grimshaw, says: “The walk to the door felt like it went on forever. I felt such a mixture of anticipation, excitement, fear and adrenaline. We embraced and just talked and talked until 5am.”

“It was almost like a love story. The first two weeks were very heady; we had to be around each other, we had to call each other. She never ever felt like my mum. My Mum who brought me up is [my] mum. But there was a definite attachment.”

Sadly, Lesley died at the start of the pandemic, but Sue adds: “I’ve got two lovely half-sisters. I’m close to them and I see Kate, the youngest one, quite a bit. My Mum and Dad were so welcoming; Lesley came to my father’s funeral. It’s very much like [we’re] part of a bigger family; it’s been lovely.”

Sue’s memoir is published on September 26 ( Image: DAILY MIRROR)

Sue joined Coronation Street almost 25 years ago. And in another incredible twist, her cobbles’ co-star Helen Worth (Gail Platt) was once flatmates with Lesley. “She knew that Lesley had this child [she’d given up],” Sue says. “And Helen is Godmother to one of my half-sisters!”

Sue, who is a panellist on the ITV lunchtime chat show Loose Women, says the discovery never affected her relationship with her parents or her brother Paul. The actress, whose memoir is out on Thursday, says: “I’ve only ever had one mum and she was so warm and generous. There was no jealousy; she welcomed Lesley with open arms and told her she could visit anytime.”

• A Work in Progress by Sue Cleaver is published in hardback by Bloomsbury Publishing, £20