Cleo Sylvestre is still playing with her blues band   [Angela Cobbinah]

WHEN actor Cleo Sylvestre checked her spam emails “out of curiosity” this summer she opened her inbox to find a message from the Royal family awarding her an MBE – and another email from a “well-known rock star” inviting her to his Christmas party.

Respectfully, she doesn’t reveal who. And she seems unfazed by her star-studded contents of the emails almost lost to the junk folder, perhaps owing to her long career which has seen her work alongside Ken Loach and the Rolling Stones, and receive praise from Laurence Olivier.

Even at the age of 78, and a year after she suffered from a stroke, Ms Sylvestre’s trade is still evolving. At the end of the month she’s performing in a production about refugees at Ally Pally.

She also plays a monthly gig with her blues band at the Rosemary Branch in Islington – not far from where she now lives now in trendy De Beauvoir, Hackney, or “De Bourgeois” as her three kids call it. Ms Sylvestre’s journey begins in Drummond Street near Euston, where she grew up as an only child surrounded by her mum’s records.

“We had a big table and I used to play under it with Mum and we made up stories. We made puppets and we used to do puppet shows with all different voices,” Ms Sylvestre told the New Journal.

This, and trips to the library in Robert Street, the old cinema in Tolmers Square and the now demolished Bedford theatre in Camden Town to see pantos, inspired her early on to pursue acting.

She attended Edith Neville Primary School and when she turned 12 the family moved to the Regent’s Park Estate, an area that is unrecognisable to Ms Sylvestre now.

“The area has been destroyed now because of the HS2 disaster,” she said. “The playground where I used to play on the swings and everything is completely gone. I went to the Temperance Hospital nursery, which has gone.”

But there have also been some positive changes since she moved out of the borough to buy a home once she got married in her 30s.

“When I go down there now, the demographic has changed a lot,” she said. “Growing up, I was the only person of colour on Regent’s Park estate. There weren’t so many of us really. I could go on the trolley bus to Camden every day and I’d never see another black person for weeks and weeks. You don’t really get used to that feeling. I sometimes felt like an outsider, but I don’t really feel that way anymore.”

Ms Sylvestre attended Camden School for Girls, where she starred in school plays and when her career began with an unexpected meeting of a group that would become the world’s biggest rock band.

“Camden School for Girls had an amazing music department,” she said. “We had all sorts of people going to perform there. I remember people like the guitarist Andrés Segovia going there. So it was great with the arts and music.”

During her school years, she danced in a blues club in Soho where she met and befriended the Rolling Stones. She recalled Mick Jagger, with whom she is still friends, coming round to her mum’s flat in Derwent for dinner.

Ms Sylvestre said: “Mick came up to me one day and said that they were starting a band and would I like to sing in it? I mean, he didn’t know whether I could sing or not. So I went along to a few rehearsals in Chelsea. And then one day he phoned me up and said ‘we’re in the studio’. By then they started to get more popular. So we went to Regent Sound in Denmark Street. And Phil Spector was there.”

While in sixth form, at the age of just 18, she recorded the single To Know Him Is to Love Him with the Rolling Stones. But acting was what she always wanted to do and she didn’t make any more songs with the group.

Ms Sylvestre’s first big break came when she played alongside Alec Guinness in a West End play in 1967. Laurence Olivier was in the audience.

“After the show he came up to my dressing room, which was way up because I was one of the juveniles, and he congratulated me. I couldn’t speak. I couldn’t believe it. I don’t think I said anything to him, I just mouthed like a goldfish,” she said.

After that she became the first black woman to play a lead role at the National Theatre when she starred in National Health. At the time she wasn’t aware she was making history. It was just “another job”.

She said: “I remember the first night I was so nervous that I thought people would see my legs shaking.”

She went on to act in Ken Loach’s heart-wrenching dramas Cathy Come Home, Up the Junction and Poor Cow.

“In those days, all the black roles on telly and everything were mostly West Indians,” Ms Sylvestre said. “I think he appreciated the fact that I was from London. And they were doing Up The Junction so he put me in it. I was quite political. Well, I still am. And he was giving out messages that I really wanted to endorse.

“He didn’t direct you in a traditional way. There was a lot of freedom and he was quite subtle. He sort of explained things and then you’d just go with the flow. There was lots of improvisation.”

Being a black, female actor in a white, male world throughout the 60s and 70s came with many hostile working environments, but each setback made Ms Sylvestre feel “more determined to succeed”.

On her first job at the BBC the makeup department were sent into a panic because they didn’t have the right makeup to match her skin colour. One theatre company said they’d consider casting her only if they do The Crucible, which featured a black slave in it.

“Even recently too. I’ve got my hair in cornrows and you often find that people can’t do it if you unpick it and then you ask for it to be put back into cornrows. They can’t do it,” she said.

Ms Sylvestre said representation has improved. There are more ethnic minorities on the TV than when she was starting off in her career, but it’s still difficult for older women to get cast, she said. That hasn’t stopped her from featuring in plays.

And in June, she was honoured to receive her MBE from Princess Anne for her acting and charity work.

She said she’s aware of why some people reject honours to refuse endorsing the colonising British Empire, including her friend, Mr Loach, who turned down an OBE in 1977.

But Ms Sylvestre said: “I think [I did it] for all the others who are like me in a way, who sort of struggled and had a dream and realised that sometimes your dreams do come true.”