Leah Bracknell
Actress
ACTRESS LEAH Bracknell, who has died at 55, became synonymous with Zoe Tate, the Emmerdale character she played for nearly 16 years.
She was also known for teaching at the British School of Yoga and creating her own line of jewellery.
Her father, film director David Bracknell, had brought her to the screen in The Chiffy Kids ,a children’s serial shown at cinema matinees in 1976 but she soon took her future into her own hands.
Only two years after studying at the Webber Douglas Academy of Dramatic Art and aged 25, she was cast in ITV’s Yorkshire soap, where she made her mark playing the first openly gay female in a British serial.
She left the show in 2005 but it did not spell the end of her acting career. She went on to Judge John Deed, Casualty 1907, Doctors and another Yorkshire soap, The Royal Today.
She also turned to theatre, starring in Gaslight and Strangers on a Train.
She revealed in October 2016, at 52, she had been diagnosed with terminal lung cancer. With few options available on the NHS, her husband, Jez Hughes, launched an online appeal to raise money for treatment overseas.
Speaking in February on ITV’s Loose Women, she said she had retained a positive outlook on life, having formed a “relationship” with her cancer to try to understand it.
She was diagnosed after rapid weight gain around her abdomen and breathlessness prompted her to seek medical help.
Ms Bracknell also revealed she was taking a new medication which she hoped would give her a longer life expectancy. However, in August she revealed her treatment had stopped working.
Alison Rosalind Bracknell was born in Westminster, London, into a theatrical family. Apart from her father’s TV work, her mother was Chinese-Malayan actress Li-Er Hwang.
Her parents met while filming the William Holden film The World of Suzie Wong in Hong Kong in 1959. David was an assistant director and Li-Er was in the cast.
Ms Bracknell grew up in London and Oxford.
Her character’s life on Emmerdale was typical of the genre, dealing with deaths of her father and brother, the betrayal and departure of her stepmother, battling schizophrenia and coming out as gay.
Of-screen, it was a different story. A mother of two, she taught meditation and yoga at Baildon, near Bradford, and established a jewellery collection of her own designs, which she named after female Shakespeare characters. She donated some of the profits to Wheatfields Hospice in Leeds.
She is survived by Jez, whom she married in 2017, and by her children from her first marriage, which ended in divorce.