personal finance

'Acting had to take a back step for my family, but now I’m staging a musical'


Name: Kali Peacock
Age: 44
Occupation: Actor, Eastbourne
Income: £8,000-£12,000 including self-employed earnings and benefits

I knew I wanted to be an actor after I was cast as chief Oompa Loompa in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory when I was eight. I’ve spent most of my career working in theatre productions but have also starred in TV shows such as The Inbetweeners and My Family. The biggest thing I’ve acted in was Finding Neverland with Johnny Depp. However, my career had to take a back step when my husband Martin and I started our family six years ago.

When Finn came along it felt like the rug had been pulled from under us. He was born with a rare brain condition called pachygyria that manifested itself in uncontrollable seizures. He would have hundreds day and night.

When he was 19 weeks old, he had a hemispherotomy at Great Ormond Street hospital. They severed the connections between the two sides of his brain. This stopped the seizures but left him with cerebral palsy. The right-hand side of his body is weak, he’s lost half his sight, he has development delays and has recently been diagnosed with autism. He can’t walk without a frame and the support of an adult, and he can’t speak.

He’s a total whizz on the iPad and he laughs a lot. He’s taught himself so much including learning the alphabet on a toy, which left us speechless. We also have two daughters: Naia, four, and Rae, two.

I still do the odd acting job. It tends to be voiceovers and radio promotions because I can’t up sticks like I used to. My income varies from month to month – it could be £200 or £750, or nothing at all. We receive £180 in child tax credit a week and child benefits of £140 a month, plus money for mobility care for Finn. It was more likely that I would find work, so my husband is the official carer for Finn; he receives a carer’s allowance of £60 a week. Being dependent on benefits isn’t something that sits well with me or that I would ever have envisaged.

A year ago I launched a charity production company called UnderWired with actor and friend Katy Morgan. We wanted to create more opportunities for mums and women over 40 in the industry, having found that work pretty much dried up for us once we’d had children or lived outside London. We’re running a multi-sensory Christmas family musical, The Lost Toys’ Big Christmas Adventure, from 13 to 29 December at the White Rock theatre in Hastings and the Royal Hippodrome theatre in Eastbourne.

It’s such an important project for many reasons: I needed to do something creative to remind me who I used to be. Also, it’s difficult to find things we can do together as a family because of Finn’s needs. Often we have to split up. I take the girls to soft play and Martin takes Finn and walks our dog, Neeps. Our aim was to create an accessible, affordable Christmas theatre show for the whole family, including those with disabilities. I’m so proud of what we’ve created. We haven’t taken a salary from it. We’ve also covered all the expenses – meetings, petrol, train fares, childcare.

We’ve been waiting to be urgently rehomed by the council for more than three years, as our current home isn’t suitable for Finn’s needs. However, a friend of ours is buying us a home and will become our landlord in March. This will be life-changing for us. Finn will have a downstairs bedroom and wet room, so we won’t have to carry all 30kg of him up and down the stairs.

Life is pretty tough. We’re always in debt. We spend more than we receive every month. Our current rent is £850 a month. The bills all come out of my account as I receive all the childcare tax and benefits. We do a family shop once a week that comes to more than £100.

My biggest vice is white wine. Life is extremely stressful being Finn’s mum. Any mother of a child with complex needs has to fight. You have to fight for everything – therapy, equipment, school, transport.

It keeps me awake at night that I don’t have any savings or a pension. But I’m more concerned about right here and now and getting through to the end of the day. If the kids are fed and happy, then we’re winning.



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