Deborah McAndrew (born 1967) is a British playwright and actor, known for playing Angie Freeman in Coronation Street in the 1990s. She is also co-founder and Creative Director of the Stoke-on-Trent-based Claybody Theatre Company,^[1] and a visiting lecturer in the Department of Drama and Theatre Arts at Staffordshire University.^[2]

McAndrew was born in Huddersfield, West Riding of Yorkshire, and later moved to Ossett and then Leeds. She had two younger sisters. She had always wanted to write plays; the family regularly holidayed with another family with four children, giving her a cast of seven.^[3]

She studied drama at the University of Manchester and a PGCE in Drama and Special Education at Bretton Hall College of Education.^[2]

McAndrew joined the cast of the long-lived Granada television soap Coronation Street for four years across two periods in the 1990s, playing young designer Angie Freeman.^[4] She has appeared in theatre, radio and television including the BBC Radio 4 detective series Stone,^[5] as Lily Gaskell in the 2013 BBC Radio 4 Extra radio adaptation of Elizabeth Gaskell's Wives and Daughters,^[6] and as Mrs. Dashwood in Helen Edmundson's 2013 Radio 4 adaptation of Jane Austen's Sense and Sensibility.^[7] She first joined Northern Broadsides as an actor in 1995.^[3]

In 2004 McAndrew adapted Leopold Lewis's 1871 play The Bells for Northern Broadsides.^[8] Since then her adaptations have included Dario Fo’s Accidental Death of an Anarchist,^[9] Nikolai Gogol’s The Government Inspector^[10] and Nikolai Erdman’s The Suicide, under the new title The Grand Gesture.^[3][11]

Her first original script was Vacuum (2006, set in a vacuum cleaner repair shop and performed by Northern Broadsides).^[12] She wrote Flamingoland, about a woman with breast cancer, in 2008, for the New Vic Theatre,^[13] and in 2013 she wrote Ugly Duck, set among the Staffordshire pottery trade, for the Claybody Theatre Company which she co-founded in that area.^[3]

Her 2014 play An August Bank Holiday Lark,^[14] a Northern Broadsides co-production with the New Vic Theatre, Newcastle-under-Lyme, won that year's UK Best New Play award from the UK Theatre awards for regional theatre.^[15] Set in Saddleworth at the start of World War I, it features the village's traditional rushbearing procession and morris dancing.^[16]

McAndrew has written several plays for the Mikron Theatre Company, a touring company which in summer travels by canal boat. These include Losing the Plot (2012, set amongst allotment gardeners), Beyond the Veil (2013, allotments again, beekeeping and murder),^[17] Till the Cows Come Home (2014, on icecream making),^[18] and One of Each (2015, concerning fish and chips).^[2][19]

Her play Dirty Laundry, a mystery set in a small house in the heart of Stoke-on-Trent, was performed in the old Spode factory in October 2017. Featuring a cast of professional actors accompanied by the community cast of Claybody Theatre Company, Dirty Laundry received excellent reviews.^[20]

Her 2017/2018 adaptation of Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol gained good reviews at the Hull Truck Theatre in Hull, East Yorkshire.^{[citation needed]}

In April 2018, McAndrew was announced as Leeds Trinity University's new Chancellor, replacing Gabby Logan.^[21] She was installed as Chancellor in a ceremony in the University Chapel on 15 June 2018.^[22]

McAndrew is married to Conrad Nelson, actor, musician and Musical Director of Northern Broadsides. They have a daughter.^[3]