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The co-director of the drama school where Adolescence star Owen Cooper trained has said she hopes his Emmy win will encourage producers to “look outside the box” when it comes to casting working-class and northern talent.

Cooper, 15, became the youngest ever male recipient of an Emmy on Sunday, when he won the best supporting actor in a limited series award for his role as the teenage murder suspect Jamie Miller in the Netflix drama.

Esther Morgan, who runs the Drama MOB school in Didsbury, Manchester, with the Coronation Street star Tina O’Brien, helped train Cooper alongside hundreds of other young people from the north-west from a wide variety of backgrounds.

She said they were delighted at his success and pleased to see the producers taking the time to look for talent outside London.

“There’s a frustration in the industry that everything seems to happen in London, despite the talent that exists elsewhere,” Morgan said. “We were really passionate that we wanted to build something from the north, for northern kids and provide them with the same opportunities, no matter where they’re from.”

Cooper was cast in Adolescence after Stephen Graham, who co-created and starred in the series as the father of Cooper’s character, insisted on casting an unknown northern actor for the role. Graham has previously said he and the production team wanted to give a chance to young people “who may not normally have those opportunities” and that doing so was the show’s biggest achievement.

Morgan said: “We’re so proud of Owen and so happy for him, and he’s worked so hard, and we’re delighted that the producers took the time to look for northern talent and took a chance on him. But it’s so rare they’ll take that chance, and so much talent is never looked at.”

Morgan hopes that Cooper’s win will motivate more young people in the north-west to give the arts a try, and encourage a broader approach to casting that will enable people outside the capital, especially younger people, to be put on an equal footing for roles in the future.

“You hope now that with the story of Owen, who you know, is just a normal kid from Warrington, more people will consider sending their kids to the school,” Morgan said. “What we really want, and what we hope Owen’s success does, is give a bit of a message out to everybody that maybe there is some really good raw northern talent out there, and in the rest of the country. Maybe come and look in different places in future to find that talent; maybe you’ll find a star.”

The Drama MOB school offers students a range of options, including the possibility of attending for nothing, so that young people can access the arts regardless of household income to “bridge that gap and make sure that it is accessible to everybody”.

In the past, Morgan has lamented the way talent outside the south is viewed, saying casting directors and producers have rarely given talent in other parts of the UK a chance even when a production is based there, and that when an actor such as Cooper is cast, there is a narrative that they have “done nothing and came from nowhere” despite being trained.

This year marks the 250th anniversary of Jane Austen’s birth. While the precise day is December 16, the book world has been marking the occasion all year with homages, story spin-offs, new editions of her novels and celebrations, including a massive 10-day Jane Austen festival this month in Bath, England.

The beloved English novelist, whose stories have launched a million rom-coms, could hardly have imagined the vastness of her influence more than 200 years after she published her stories anonymously — or “by a lady.”

Austen’s presence can be felt across our entertainment culture, from the Emma-inspired film Clueless (1995) to the 1996 novel (and later, film) Bridget Jones’s Diary, whose plot author Helen Fielding admits she “nicked” from Pride and Prejudice. British writer Ian McEwan has said Austen’s fingerprints are all over his 2001 masterpiece Atonement; her work is “the ghost that stalks this novel,” he once told a French audience. The list of film adaptations and books inspired by her work goes on and on, including Bollywood movies, graphic novels, erotic fiction and monster tales (2009 brought the bestseller Pride and Prejudice and Zombies by Seth Grahame-Smith and Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters, a parody by Ben H. Winters).

Today you can stream Jane Austen Wrecked My Life, a rom-com about a lovelorn, Austen-obsessed bookseller in Paris, and Miss Austen, a four-part PBS miniseries released in May that reimagines the lives of Jane and her sister, Cassandra.  

Two new film versions of her books are in the works too: Netflix’s upcoming six-part Pride and Prejudice, now in production, stars Emma Corrin (Diana in The Crown) as Elizabeth Bennet, Olivia Colman as Mrs. Bennet, and Scottish actor Jack Lowden as Mr. Darcy. Focus Features is filming a new Sense and Sensibility movie with Daisy Edgar-Jones (Twister) and Esmé Creed-Miles as sisters Elinor and Marianne Dashwood; Outlander’s Caitríona Balfe plays their mother.

Who was Jane Austen?

Austen, one of eight siblings, was born in 1775 to a clergyman in rural southern England. She began writing stories around age 11, when her formal education ended. Her father always encouraged her to read, offering her full access to his extensive home library, and gave her a portable wooden writing desk for her 19th birthday. When she was 25, her father retired, and the remaining members of her household — the Rev. and Mrs. Austen, Jane and Cassandra — downsized from the roomy rectory to smaller quarters in Bath, a fading resort town.

After Rev. Austen’s death four years later, Jane, Cassandra, their mother, and a family friend moved into Chawton Cottage, now the Jane Austen House Museum. There, the author revised and wrote her six novels on a tiny, portable writing table. She died at 41 of a mysterious illness.

Austen scholars say this life was not as dreary as the bare facts suggest: She loved going to London, attending the theater, shopping, taking holidays by sea, where she enjoyed being dunked in the ocean by an old-fashioned bathing machine, and gossip. In a new book, Wild for Austen: A Rebellious, Subversive, and Untamed Jane, Arizona State University professor Devoney Looser expands on instances of the author’s worldliness (Austen once bragged that she was excellent at spotting adulteresses, for example). 

More reasons to love Jane

1. She captured the realities of women’s lives — particularly the frustrations of smart, young women whose energies were narrowed to husband-seeking in the refined society of late 18th-century England. As a single woman with almost no career path available, like many ladies in her day, Austen captured how landing a prosperous husband was essential for financial security and social acceptance, often at the expense of love. “[Her books] are about how to live a meaningful life in a world that’s deeply unfair,” Looser says. “And that speaks to a lot of people.”

2. She used humor to brilliant effect. She also brought the funny, whether through Pride and Prejudice’s Mrs. Bennet’s humblebragging about her daughters or Persuasion’s Sir Walter Elliot, who reads about “his own history with an interest that never failed.” Looser says Austen was exceptional for “creat[ing] comic fiction of lasting genius, either on the level of the word, sentence, chapter, character or plot,” says Looser. “These characters resemble real people.”

3. She understood love. “Pride and Prejudice is the uber–romance novel,” says best-selling YA novelist Nicola Yoon (Everything, Everything), who wrote the introduction to the new Vintage Classic edition of the book. “You can see [Elizabeth and Darcy] working their way towards each other, [but] before they can get to each other, they have to get through themselves and their flaws and obstacles,” Yoon says. “We’re still feeling what Jane Austen wanted us to feel. It’s a bit magical.”