EASTENDERS E A
ASTENDERS matriarchs are usually given the most dramatic doof doof exits. But not Rosa di Marco, who died of a heart attack off screen after she’d moved to Leicester.
At the time Louise Jameson said she was “gutted” the character she’d played for two years was unceremoniously booted from the BBC soap.
Now she reveals secret rows over a dark storyline may have led to her fictional family being culled in 2000.
Louise says: “I was really annoyed about the way my exit was announced. I was told the night before it appeared in the papers under the headline, ‘Di Marcos Axed’. I thought they could have run it by me a bit beforehand so I could tell my family. It just wasn’t respectful.
“Shortly before that announcement they’d wanted to run a particular story that I wasn’t happy with and I wonder if that was the beginning of my demise. They were going to make Rosa racist.
“It’s not that I wouldn’t play a racist if the overall feel was anti-racism. But when you’re in a soap, people identify you so strongly with the character you’re playing so I didn’t want to appear racist.”
Louise, 68, had shaped EastEnders history perhaps more than producers knew. In the early 1970s, while volunteering at Leyhill Prison, Glos, she met an inmate serving life for murder and encouraged his acting skills.
He was the late Leslie Grantham, who had shot taxi driver Felix Reese in the head but went on to play the soap’s most memorable villain Dirty Den Watts.
“Leslie was insecure, nervous, talented and very funny. I saw a prison production he was in and he was really good,” says Louise. “His probation officer asked if I’d be a mate on the outside. So my former boyfriend and I got his audition speeches up to scratch.
“He was always completely grateful and said thanks, but all we did was facilitate a talent and he grabbed it with both hands and ran.
“The proudest moment was when he got into college. And the rest is history.” nd what a chequered history. Leslie’s years of fame, which peaked when a record 30 million viewers watched Den serve divorce papers to Angie, were ruined by a webcam sex scandal in 2004.
Leslie died, aged 71, in 2018. Louise says: “I’m sad he’s gone, because he kind of mucked up a couple of times, didn’t he? He was careless with social media. The man had come full circle. He’d lived a life.
“By the time he died he was honourable and had apologised to everyone he needed to apologise to.”
It says much about Louise not just that she volunteered to help prisoners, but that she maintains friendships for decades in the showbiz world.
She holidayed with Nadia Sawalha during her EastEnders stint and June Brown, Barbara Windsor and the late Wendy Richard became confidantes. “I was going through a tricky time around EastEnders – my marriage had split up. They were fetching cups of tea. “I haven’t seen Barbara lately – the last time was roughly five years ago when she was very affectionate. I don’t know if she had dementia then. Her husband Scott’s been absolutely amazing – bodyguard, champion, carer – phenomenal.” Tom Baker is still Louise’s