Shaking for hours, her exhausted body numbed to near paralysis, her normally active mind mirroring the inertia in her limbs.
This was Joanna Scanlan aged 29, about as far as could possibly be from the poised, funny, vivacious underdog who beat House of Gucci’s Lady Gaga to win Best Actress at Sunday’s BAFTAs.
Her shock victory was one of the moments of the night, and her poignant speech, one she never thought she would get to give.
Half a lifetime ago, just before her 30th birthday, the 60-year-old star suffered a breakdown, brought on by the stress of her job, teaching drama at Leicester Polytechnic, coupled with the heartbreak of rejection from the acting world.
From childhood, the talented little girl from West Kirby on the Wirral, who later grew up in North Wales, had dreamed of becoming an actress.
Studying alongside Stephen Fry, Emma Thompson and good pal Tilda Swinton at Cambridge University in the 1980s, the path seemed set for her.
But while their careers soared after graduation, she floundered. She still keeps the “stinging” rejection letters, never thinking she would overcome it, let alone enter the glitz of BAFTA.
The experience explains her reaction to her win for her portrayal of Mary Hussain, a woman grieving her husband in the powerful drama After Love.
“Come on,” the astonished actress implored the audience with perfect comic timing, adding: “Some stories have surprise endings, don’t they?”
One she did not foresee amid the blur of a breakdown that forced her out of work for 12 months.
Talking about that dark period, she said the depression had felt like paralysis, which would take the form of shaking for several hours.
Diagnosed with chronic fatigue after 18 months of tests, she moved back with her parents, walked the dog and helped with the shopping. Even that could prove too much.
She explained it had been a “shock” when she couldn’t get acting work while her peers became established names.
She was so tight with Tilda they had landed in court together when Joanna drove her friend’s car without insurance.
“It felt like I was trying to join in a party that I wasn’t really invited to,” she once said.
“At the time I didn’t know how to deal with that – I just thought, ‘OK, I haven’t got anything to offer’… I just thought, ‘I’m no good’.”
She only began to get better when an insightful doctor recognised she was deeply unhappy at work, and told her that she should
try again.
“He said to me, ‘What job do you do?’ I said I was teaching. He asked if that was what I was planning to do. I said, ‘No, I was hoping to be an actress.’
“And he just said, ‘Right, OK, if you don’t go back to acting you’ll be ill for the rest of your life.’”
It was a “thunderbolt”. Getting well was like “turning around a liner across the ocean,” she later admitted.
But she started making calls, working as a researcher for the Arts Council to pay her way.
Finally, aged 34, she landed the role of a midwife in Peak Practice. It was 1997 and her first professional job.
“People were saying anyone over 40 is finished as a woman in this profession,” Joanna said.
She also began writing for series including children’s hit Byker Grove.
In 2005 she made her name as civil servant Terri Coverley in The Thick of It, and Getting On, the NHS comedy she co-wrote.
Roles have built steadily – she has appeared in films including The Other Boleyn Girl, Bridget Jones’s Baby, and Tulip Fever.
On TV, she has landed parts in No Offence, Dracula and Doc Martin. And she is Ma in ITV ’s Darling Buds of May remake, The Larkins, due to return this year.
Joanna also appeared in the dark comedy Murder Most Horrid, starring Dawn French, in 1999.
But she has never quite seen herself as fitting in her professional world.
The feeling seems to have started at Cambridge. As a child growing up in the countryside with her two brothers, then moving to Wales at 13 and helping out behind reception in her parents’ hotel, she belonged.
At her convent girls’ school she was happy, too. But Cambridge was a shock.
She was one of the first women to be allowed a place at her college and has also spoken of a violent male culture, and sexual harassment.
Joanna has described it as an “ordeal”, and told an anecdote about a male student jumping in her window one night and sleeping on the floor.
She said men would come into the bar, stand on the table, and “piss into a beer glass on your table”.
Joanna did not get on in the iconic Footlights drama group, famed for members including Fry.
“Really, it didn’t fit me very well... I felt my suggestions didn’t sit right. I remember writing this sketch about a children’s sex education book. And I remember everybody sort of going, ‘That’s a bit rude’,” she recalled.
“It was OK if you were being clever about politics. But to be too earthy, or what I think of as womanly, didn’t fit.”
And there has been her appearance. “As someone who is overweight, early on in my career I got sent lots of characters who were fat and funny, good-time girls. That’s not me,” she has said.
Joanna made a point of the bias in her speech at Sunday’s awards at the Royal Albert Hall. After accepting her gong, she said: “It doesn’t get bigger than BAFTA for a British actor.
“And especially someone like myself who’s well on in years. I’m 60. I’m older, I’m not the normal shape, I’m lots of things you wouldn’t expect necessarily to be honoured in this way.”
Joanna is used to waiting for her moment. She waited for acting, and love, meeting her accountant husband Neil aged 46 at a yoga class.
She has admitted she would have “loved to have become a mother”, but added she is probably a better actress without children.
“I feel no sadness. This is my life, and my life is as it’s meant to be.”
Touchingly, she thanked Neil on Sunday, saying: “He’s the living proof there is no such thing as ‘after love’.”
Joanna may have waited for acclaim. But not anymore.
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