Leah Bracknell
Actress indelibly linked with the role of the disaster-prone Zoe Tate over 16 years in Emmerdale
LEAH BRACKNELL, who has died of cancer aged 55, played the vet Zoe Tate in ITV’S Yorkshire farming saga Emmerdale between 1989 and 2005, the first lesbian character to feature regularly in a British soap.
She came out as gay on screen in 1993, a year before Beth Jordache (Anna Friel) bestowed her first lesbian kiss in Brookside on Channel 4. In May 1996 the doe-eyed Zoe arrived at the church for her wedding to Emma (Rachel Ambler), only to stop short at the door, smitten at the sight of her best woman and old flame Susie (Louise Heaney), the occasion ending in a three-way catfight.
“It was all about as likely to happen in a Yorkshire village as Geoff Boycott joining the local Morris Dancers,” complained the television critic of The Sun, “but great fun all the same.”
During her 16 years in Emmerdale, she havered between gay and straight, but Zoe Tate’s on-screen sexuality was merely one aspect of her controversial and multifaceted persona that made her one of the most unhinged and ill-fated characters in soap.
As well as conducting an affair with her brother’s fiancée, she struggled against mental illness and alcoholism, and in 1996, during the show’s 2,000th episode, was the victim of an attempted rape.
In five consecutive episodes in a single week in 1999, Zoe Tate took the law into her own hands when the local police in Beckindale failed to find her missing brother Chris (Peter Amory). She was convinced that her smoothtalking half-brother Liam (Mark Powley) was somehow involved in his disappearance, and the storyline moved to a dramatic and violent climax when she shot him dead.
But while one tabloid was struck by her Audrey Hepburn looks and “blissful cheekbones”, Leah Bracknell believed that the most important thing about Zoe’s character – and the one she was proudest of portraying – was her schizophrenia. After one psychotic episode she could not remember her drunken one-night stand with the village hunk that resulted in a baby girl.
In 2005 she left the show in spectacular fashion, blowing up her former family home which she had been tricked into selling. The scene earned her the Best Exit award at the British Soap Awards in 2006.
After Emmerdale, she returned to the theatre opposite Peter Amory as Bella Manningham in a tour of Patrick Hamilton’s psychological Victorian thriller Gaslight and starred in another provincial tour, of Patricia Highsmith’s Strangers on a Train. That Christmas she was in panto as Prince Charming in a production of Cinderella at the Lyceum Theatre, Crewe, the first of numerous such seasonal appearances.
She also taught yoga in her spare time, having qualified with the British School of Yoga, and designed and produced her own line of ethnic jewellery. A percentage of the profits went to a hospice in Headingley and to Rethink, a charity helping people affected by mental illness which she had come across while playing Zoe in Emmerdale.
She was born Alison Rosalind Bracknell in London on July 12 1964. Her father, David Bracknell, was a film and television director who worked on some of the Carry On films and met her mother, the Chinese-malaysian actress Li-er Hwang, during filming of
The World of Suzie Wong in Hong Kong in 1959. Adopting and anglicising her mother’s name to Leah, she grew up in London and Oxford and spent a year in New Zealand and Fiji, where her father was working on the 1983 film Savage Islands.
After attending the Webber Douglas Academy of Dramatic Art, she worked as an auxiliary nurse on a geriatric ward in a south London hospital, then toured with the Eastern Actors’ Studio as Joanna in All Sewn Up and with the Pandemonium Theatre Company, Cardiff, as Maria in Out of the Valley and Katie in Flying Visit. She also appeared with the Oxford Players as Marina in Pericles and as Mephistopheles in Doctor Faustus for the Klaxon Theatre Company.
She made her television debut in The Chiffy Kids (ITV, 1976), directed by her father, and was subsequently cast in small roles in The Cannon and Ball Show and The Bill. She was working as a waitress when she was cast in Emmerdale Farm (it was the last year before “Farm” was dropped from the title) as the vet and landowner Zoe Tate.
In 2007 she joined the cast of another ITV soap, The Royal Today, filmed in an old wing of St Luke’s Hospital in Bradford, as the nononsense matron, Jenny Carrington. The following year she starred as the governess in the touring Theatreworks production of Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw. She also appeared in the television drama Judge John Deed, and in the daytime soap Doctors.
During her years in Emmerdale, Leah Bracknell received numerous soap and television drama awards. In a retrospective in 2012 to mark the programme’s 40th anniversary, she recalled her reaction to being told her character was coming out as a lesbian, and how at first she thought the producers were joking. Subsequently she felt proud to have been part of such a groundbreaking story.
In 2013 she joined anti-fracking campaigners protesting against proposals to drill for shale gas near her home in Sussex.
Diagnosed with terminal lung cancer in 2016, Leah Bracknell, a former smoker who had long given up the habit, underwent experimental treatment in Germany, paid for by a crowdfunding campaign organised by her long-term partner, Jez Hughes, which raised more than £50,000.
She told ITV’S Lorraine programme the following year that she had learnt to appreciate the “simple, little things” in life to help her, and that she held an “attitude of gratitude”, even if she had to “fake it”.
She married Jez Hughes in 2017. He survives her, with two daughters from an earlier relationship with the writer and director Lyall Watson.
Leah Bracknell, born July 12 1964, died October 16 2019