Bonham Carter takes on role of Crossroads star
WHEN Noele Gordon was sacked from Crossroads, it was the end of the line for one of soap’s biggest stars.
Her departure in 1981 was such a shock to viewers that it made ITV’S News at Ten and Gordon never got over the feeling of betrayal.
She did not act in another TV show, and died in 1985, aged 65.
Now her legacy is to be revived in an ITV drama. Helena Bonham Carter is to play Gordon in Nolly, a threepart series written by Russell T Davies and billed as a “heartbreaking portrait of a forgotten icon”.
Bonham Carter said she wanted to restore Gordon to her rightful place in the pantheon of television greats.
“Noele Gordon was a fascinating, complex, brilliant and gutsy woman – none of which I knew before I read Russell T Davies’s script.
“I’m so thrilled to help tell Nolly’s long overdue and largely forgotten story. Russell’s screenplay is a work of brilliance,” she said.
Gordon played Crossroads Motel owner Meg Richardson, later Meg Mortimer, standing firm for 18 years amid the soap’s famously wobbly sets. Out of the blue, in 1981, she was informed by bosses at ATV that she was to be written out.
Gordon went to the press, saying she wept all night after an executive disposed of her in tones so emotionless it was “as though he was reading a weather report”.
She appealed directly to Lord Grade, head of ATV, but he refused to intervene even though protesters had gathered outside the studios in Birmingham.
“It is not I who have left Crossroads. It is Crossroads which has left me,” she told the media.
The drama, which starts filming next year, promises to reveal “the truth, the consequences and the legacy of that terrible day”.
In the end, Gordon’s character was not killed off in the Midlands soap but sailed away on the QE2.