Coronation Street's brash ladies' man
Johnny Briggs was already a well-known face in films and on television when he made his debut in 1976 in ITV’s epic soap Coronation Street as the crafty Cockney Mike Baldwin.
Although Granada producers had made it a rule to use only artists unfamiliar to the viewing public, Briggs was an exception. Not only had he become a fixture on television and in films, he had also appeared the Royal Court Theatre in London, which was still regarded as a nursery for new talent.
Briggs, who died Sunday at 85, said he believed he fitted in at Coronation Street “because I was playing a sort of outsider anyway. Being a Londoner, a factory boss, everyone expected Mike to be a bit flash,” he explained.
But his abiding passion was golf. Such was Briggs’s obsession with the game that his first wife remembered him missing the birth of his first child in 1965. “He couldn’t even be bothered to come to the hospital,” she said. “He was out on the course.”
Briggs first appeared in Coronation Street in 1974 as a van driver, and was asked back two years later to play Mike Baldwin and to join the regular cast.
His confrontations with his love rival Ken Barlow (played by William Roache) became a regular feature of the storylines, and observers believed there was something of Mike Baldwin in Briggs. The character had four marriages and countless affairs, including flings with Barlow’s wife and daughter.
Much ink was spilled in Fleet Street over the years chronicling Briggs’ personal life. In the mid-1990s, when he was 59, he had a six-month affair with a 21-year-old air hostess. In 2007, when he was 72, he was caught by a British tabloid “romping” with a prostitute in Thailand, and he went on to have a relationship with a makeup artist more than 40 years his junior.
Briggs left Coronation Street in 2006, after 30 years in the show.
Asked what he liked about his alter ego Baldwin, Briggs replied: “I like his approach to life, his approach to women. He doesn’t start affairs, he lets them come to him. If they don’t, then he’s really not at all bothered. He’s a very confident and basically a nice guy.”
Following his retirement from Coronation Street in 2006, Briggs received the British Soap Award for Lifetime Achievement and was appointed MBE.
Briggs, who was twice married and divorced, is survived by his six children.