Emmerdale star Steve Halliwell to release autobiography

Steve Halliwell as Zac Dingle Emmerdale

Next month fans of Emmerdale can find out much more about one of the soaps much loved actors. If The Cap Fits: My Rocky Road to Emmerdale by Steve Halliwell is released next month.

The autobiography is an honest tale of rejection and redemption throughout a fascinating and colourful life. Steve Halliwell is best known as the loveable patriarch Zak Dingle in ITV Yorkshire’s long running rural saga Emmerdale, a part he has played since 1994.

Yet before he found success in the Yorkshire Dales, Halliwell spent many years desperately seeking work, at one point spending time on the streets in search of food, sleeping in bushes, virtually living the life of a tramp. If The Cap Fits is a warts-and-all story of Halliwell’s rise to fame, where success was only won after great personal struggles, is inspirational to those who wish to establish a life and career for themselves in the face of similar hardships.

Going beyond the experiences of one man, Halliwell’s own story is evocative of a wider social, cultural and class history that permeated the country in the sixties and seventies. Kids with nits; ‘Nitty-Nora the Bug Explorer’; bitten fingernails; speech impediments; fathers with missing fingers, or missing arms, all lost in industrial accidents; stunted women with bow legs due to rickets; and fleas in beds, all serve to build a vivid picture of a time long gone.

The book is released to co-incide with the 20th anniversary of Steve Halliwell’s first appearance in Emmerdale which happened way back in October of 1994. Steve’s other telly roles include parts in fellow ITV saga Coronation Street and BBC veterinary drama All Creatures Great and Small. (pictured below: Zak gives Aaron (Danny Miller) some advice in Emmerdale)

Aaron and Zac in Emmerdale

Five Steve Halliwell Facts

  •  He had a No 1 hit single promoted by Simon Cowell when he formed a soap star band, The Woolpackers.

 

  • Steve has played four different characters in Coronation Street between 1984 and 1994. The longest running was Bob Cairns who featured in seven episodes.

 

  • He was a founder member of the Interchange Theatre in his home town of Bury.

 

  • In 1984 he featured in the controversial and graphic BBC drama Threads which showed Britain before, during and after a nuclear war.

 

  • Steve trained as an actor at the Mountview Theatre School.

 

If The Cap Fits: My Rocky Road to Emmerdale by Steve Halliwell is released in September 2014, the £12.99 paperback original is a candid autobiography of a genuine soap legend.