Corrie star who lit up the Street
Jean Alexander
Actress
BORN OCTOBER 11, 1926 – DIED OCTOBER 14, 2016, AGED 90
IN 1982 Hilda Ogden ranked just behind the Queen, Queen Mother and Princess Diana in a poll of the most recognisable women in Britain and the Coronation Street character, played by the invincible Jean Alexander for more than 1,600 episodes over 23 years, was an equally well-loved national treasure.
Universities applied to make Hilda their rector, a Welsh rugby team declared her as their mascot and in 1982 she was a pin-up for troops in the Falklands.
An appreciation society, the British League for Hilda Ogden, was started in her honour by television personality Russell Harty and included Sir Michael Parkinson, Sir Laurence Olivier and the then poet laureate Sir John Betjeman among its founder members.
The sharp-tongued gossip and her work-shy, beer-swilling on-screen husband Stan Ogden bickered constantly but provided much of the soap’s humour. The death in 1984 of actor Bernard Youens forced the writers to kill off Stan. The moving scene in which the normally unsentimental Hilda picked up his glasses and burst into tears helped Alexander to win a Royal Television Society award for best actress.
Her final episode in 1987 drew an audience of 27 million, the highest in the show’s history. Many fans, some of whom started “Save Hilda!” campaigns, did not realise she had made her own decision to depart and she always refused producers’ requests to return.
Off-screen Alexander was demure and well-spoken. “I certainly don’t own any flying ducks,” she once said. “I like gardening and listening to Beethoven.” Yet despite differing tastes she could directly relate to the character that defined her.
“Hilda’s background is just like mine,” said Alexander, who was born in Liverpool to an electrician father. “We were plain Scots, Presbyterian, hardworking and church-going.
“We had no fridge, washer, inside toilet or garden. Yet being poor didn’t do any harm. You just tried to better yourselves.”
She once claimed Hilda was more “posh” then she because she had an indoor lavatory. Even after becoming a household name Alexander refused to live the high life, admitting that she bought her clothes from BHS, rented her television set and that her stereo, despite being “good quality”, was from the 1980s.
Alexander took elocution lessons after she was inspired by the variety acts at a local theatre, becoming a repertory actress “where you have to learn your lines quickly and a new play every week”. Prior to that she worked as a library assistant for five years.
Hilda’s “look” was Alexander’s own idea and she modelled it on the working-class women employed in the munitions factories near her home in Liverpool during the Second World War. “They’d go off to their shift with their pinafores on and hair up and tied in a scarf so it didn’t get caught in the machinery,” she said.
After leaving Coronation Street she played devious shopkeeper Auntie Wainwright in more than 150 episodes of Last Of The Summer Wine from 1988 to 2010. She also appeared in the 1989 film Scandal, playing Christine Keeler’s mother. She never married, living firstly with her mother and then by herself. “These days if you are a virgin people pity or make fun of you,” she once said. “They may think that there’s something peculiar about me but there isn’t. I’ve had men friends but I was uninterested. I’ve never been in love, not enough to take up with someone and I’m glad. I think I’ve had a lucky escape.”
Over the years she became increasingly disenchanted with the soap opera that made her famous. “Today it’s all sex, doom and gloom and it’s all taken far too seriously. We also tried to make people laugh.”
The actress died three days after her 90th birthday and is survived by her niece Sonia Hearld.