Jean Alexander
The actress who starred in Coronation Street for 23 years was very different to her much-loved character, Hilda Ogden
ACTRESS Jean Alexander, who died on Friday aged 90, created a national treasure for Britain in Hilda Ogden, the nosy, pinch-mouthed tattle-tale of long-running soap opera Coronation Street.
Contrary to the part she played, Alexander was a quiet, deep-voiced woman of sober tastes. “I certainly don’t own any flying ducks,” she once said. “I like gardening and listening to Beethoven.”
Famed for her dangling cigarette, curlers, turban-style headscarf and wrap-around pinny — she was the cleaner at the Rovers Return pub for years — Hilda Ogden was voted the fourth most popular woman in Britain after the queen mother, the queen and Princess Diana.
As Hilda, Alexander became a mainstay of the (then) twice-weekly serial, invariably bickering with her workshy husband Stan and spreading gossip and scandal about ‘The Street’.
Her tuneless, high-pitched warblings (apparently inspired by that “very nice” Perry Como), and the panoramic “muriel” on her living room wall, the backdrop for her three flying plaster ducks (the loose one in the middle always crazily pointing downwards), became part of her professional signature.
But as well as finely observed spikes of high and low comedy, the part also drew from Alexander moments of intense pathos, none more memorable than her heartbroken on-screen farewell to her newly deceased husband Stan (Bernard Youens) in 1984.
Alexander based her portrayal of Hilda on wartime women munitions workers, whose heads were always covered to protect them from the machinery. “They used to wear these scarves, like pudding-cloths, tied up and the curlers would be in.”
Hilda, she noted, was always ready for a night out — “only she never went out. The curlers were always in, just in case…”
Universities applied to make Hilda Ogden their rector; a Welsh rugby team acclaimed her as their mascot; and in 1982 the Falklands fleet urgently called Granada Television for a picture of their pin-up, complete with curlers, to inspire the troops for battle.
Such was Hilda’s renown that in 1979 the television personality Russell Harty established a British League for Hilda Ogden. The founding members were Laurence Olivier (president); the scriptwriter Willis Hall (treasurer); the poet laureate John Betjeman (chairman), who declared that watching Coronation Street was his idea of heaven; Michael Parkinson (recruiting officer); and Harty himself, (secretary).
Yet Alexander was an unlikely thespian, giving the impression of being prone to nervousness and of worrying about her health. She was brought up by parents who seemed more than usually fearful of the unexpected and the height of whose ambitions for their daughter was a “safe” position in the local library.
Alexander recalled growing up in an atmosphere of mild anxiety: her grandfather had a “phobia about catching cold” and would sit “almost inside the boiler”. Her brother Ken was “terrified of the dark” and Alexander described herself as phobic. “I was afraid to go anywhere without my mother,” she said. “It was as though a demon was lurking outside ready to pounce.”
After once being punished for a minor misdemeanour by having her head held briefly under the cold tap, Alexander claimed that “the fear of water never left me. Even having a bath was fraught with dread”.
Her phobic tendencies later manifested themselves on the Coronation Street set. The actress claimed that during scenes involving an open window, technicians had to hold on to her legs, “to stop me throwing myself through it”.
The daughter of a ship’s electrician with Cunard, she was born Jean Hodgkinson on February 24, 1926, in Liverpool and brought up in Toxteth. She would take her stage name Alexander from her father Archibald’s middle name.
Later, she observed that her first home was not as “posh” as Hilda’s, as it had an “outside loo”. “It was no fun making a trip down the back yard on a cold winter’s night”, she said, “but in all other respects it was everything a lavatory should be; my mother saw to that.”
As a child, Jean and her brother Ken were often taken by their father to the Pavilion Theatre (“the Pivvy”) in Liverpool. She developed an overwhelming desire to perform after seeing Teddy Brown, “a huge American who played the xylophone”. At 15, Jean left St Edmund’s College in Princes Park, Toxteth, to become an actress. She started attending an amateur dramatics group and later, in 1943, joined the Playgoers Club with her best friend Rene Edwards.
She left her clerical post in the Liverpool library service on the promise of a job as stage manager with the Adelphi Theatre Guild based at Macclesfield. She made her stage debut in 1949 with the Adelphi (playing the juvenile lead Florrie in Somerset Maugham’s Sheppey).
“The local critics gave me the worst notice I have ever had,” she said. “‘Incompetent’ was the kindest word in it.” She nevertheless remained with the Adelphi Theatre for the next three years, finally leaving when the troupe disbanded in 1951.
Alexander moved to Southport to join a repertory company headed by Donald Bodley, and stayed for the next seven years. She described appearing in Cinderella (1952) as a “village maiden” on a stage covered with live rabbits. “They got a bit nasty,” she remembered, “we didn’t know we had a mixed group of bucks and does; but they did and they enjoyed the difference all over the stage.”
Later in Pig in a Poke, she appeared with a piglet. “The pig played its part excellently,” she recalled. “When it was time for the curtain call, Donald told me to take the pig on with me to get a laugh. The loud applause so startled the pig that it did what pigs always do when they’re afraid; all down my coat. All over my shoes.”
After a particularly successful season as the front half of a pantomime horse, Alexander moved to London.
She stayed with the actor Jimmy Beck (later Pte Walker of Dad’s Army) and his wife 18 months whilst signing on at Berwick Street dole office.
After several bit parts in series such as Z-Cars, she was offered the part of “the mum” in the 1962 show Television Club: a “dull but worthy programme in which we showed people how to do things like buy a sofa on hire purchase”.
In 1964 after appearing on The Vet Show, Jean was offered an audition for Coronation Street. She met Bernard (Bunny) Youens (cast as Stan) for a dry run in Manchester and was almost immediately offered the part.
“Our rapport,” she recalled, “was evident from the start.” She saw that Hilda “had been conceived as a nagging, slatternly wife married to a fat lout”; but thought “the Ogdens wouldn’t last long if that was all they were going to be”.
She and Youens developed the couple to the point where the storyline seemed incomplete without them.
“Audiences applauded the Ogdens’ resilience,” she recalled. Alexander remained in Coronation Street for 23 years. When not performing, most of her time between takes was spent playing Scrabble with Youens. She finally decided to leave the series after his death in 1984.
“It became clear,” she said, “that the end of the partnership meant significant changes to Hilda’s position in future stories.” Some months after Bernard Youens’ death, Stan Ogden was written out of the series.
Alexander won the Royal Television Society Award for best television performance of 1984 for her poignant solo scene as the bereaved Hilda.
Unwrapping the small parcel she had brought home from the hospital containing Stan’s few personal effects, she delivered what the serial’s long-time producer Bill Podmore called a “devastating” performance.
As Hilda silently closed Stan’s spectacle case for the last time, he wrote, “the nation wept with her”.
Apart from a self-administered dab of lipstick, she never wore make-up as Hilda Ogden.
Although she hated the original outdoor Coronation Street set, finding it bleak and wretched, she always arrived for work line-perfect, having taken the commuter train from her home in Southport, rejecting Granada’s offer of a car and driver.
“The programme never had a finer actress than Jean Alexander,” Bill Podmore declared.
Alexander left Coronation Street in 1987. She appeared on the Wogan chat show immediately afterwards, and later appeared in the Christmas edition of Last of the Summer Wine as the money-grubbing shopkeeper Auntie Wainwright. She made a cameo appearance as Christine Keeler’s mother in the 1988 film Scandal. In 1992, she returned to television in Last Of The Summer Wine as Auntie Wainwright and became a regular character; later on there were also roles in Where the Heart Is and Heartbeat.
Unlike Pat Phoenix (Coronation Street’s scarlet woman Elsie Tanner), with whom she never got on, Alexander refused multiple requests to appear as the subject of This Is Your Life.
Her autobiography The Other Side of the Street was published in 1989.
She never married.