Inner demons tortured popular soap character
Liz Dawn (Sylvia Ann Butterfield)
MBE, actress: b North Ormesby, Middlesbrough, England, November 8, 1939; m Donald Ibbetson; 3d, 1s; d UK, September 25, 2017, aged 77.
Liz Dawn played Vera Duckworth, the bubble-permed battleaxe, in the ITV soap opera for more than 30 years; as tormentor-in-chief of her screen husband, the work-shy Jack Duckworth (played by Bill Tarmey), she helped turn the couple into the most popular comedy double act in a television soap since Stan and Hilda Ogden.
Making her first fleeting appearance in the mid-1970s, Dawn, as the street’s resident nagging loudmouth, became a regular fixture in the programme in 1979.
As the critic Jack Tinker noted, Vera and Jack Duckworth followed an old tradition, that of brash, noisy newcomers disturbing the sleepy respectability of the back streets.
Lacking any formal training as an actress – or (as she once confessed) any real desire to be in show business – Dawn brought to her clamorous character the tongue of a viper and the cry of a corn crake.
But despite appearances, she was tortured by nerves, and later sought psychiatric treatment as the strain of playing such a high-profile character took its toll. ‘‘I felt from the first moment I had to show them I was capable,’’ she recalled, ‘‘and you can’t act capable if you behave like a mouse, can you? So I would grit my teeth, switch on my most confident smile and stride into action as though I’d just called in from the Royal Shakespeare Company.’’
Despite her inner demons, Dawn enjoyed a reputation for never behaving as a prima donna, never taking issue with a script or questioning the writers’ decisions. Not that she was never a problem to the programme’s producers: in 1984 they suspended her for two months following a series of newspaper articles by her and her estranged husband, and warned her that if she ventured into print again she would be sacked.
When she went to court to have him jailed for allegedly breaking an injunction, Dawn burst into tears under questioning about reports of rows between her and the rest of the cast. Whatever the truth of such stories, Dawn’s dealings with Tarmey, who portrayed her idle husband Jack, were apparently harmonious and trouble-free.
Yet, their introduction was as fiery as their subsequent on-screen relationship. After brushing against a heater during rehearsals, her dress began to smoulder, and when Tarmey grabbed her and threw her to the floor while slapping her backside, she screamed.
‘‘I thought: ‘I’m sure this isn’t in the script. He must have flipped.’ Bill said: ‘I’m sorry but you’re on fire’.’’
It was the start of a tumultuous but enduring partnership. From the outset, Dawn’s Vera sported a brassy Brillo padstyle wig of tight blonde curls. ‘‘When I started as Vera,’’ she explained, ‘‘I wanted to look different. I wanted to stand out and not look like everybody else.’’
Noticing that leading Coronation
Street stars such as Pat Phoenix (Elsie Tanner) and Barbara Knox (Rita Sullivan) were redheads, she also realised that none of the other women had curly hair. As Vera, Dawn’s formidable use of curlers echoed the hair net of an earlier Coronation Street harridan, Ena Sharples.
Elizabeth Dawn was born Sylvia Ann Butterfield in 1939 at North Ormesby, Middlesbrough, the third of five children of a skilled engineer.
Her family were Roman Catholics, and when they moved to a council maisonette in Leeds she attended St Patrick’s School followed by Leeds City Girls’ School. Leaving at 15, she began work in a tailoring factory, an experience that stood her in good stead when her character, Vera, worked as a packer and later as a machinist at Mike Baldwin’s knicker factory in Coronation Street.
When the factory set was first built, she was the only member of the cast who could use a sewing machine.
‘‘I can work 10 machines in a factory,’’ she mused. ‘‘I can do lapel-pasting, I can do edging, I can make trousers. And I think that helped from what the viewer saw; I used to get on that machine and assert myself. I didn’t wait for anyone to tell me what to do.’’
Before her television breakthrough, and to keep her young family together, she ran five clothing catalogues, worked as an Avon lady and in a toothpaste factory where, she liked to say, she screwed the tops onto the tubes.
After spells on the lightbulb counter at Woolworths and as an assistant in a shoe shop, she became a cinema usherette and worked as a singer in northern working men’s clubs at weekends, billed as Elizabeth Dawn. She hated it, likening herself to a Christian being thrown to the lions, and considered acting a cushy number by comparison.
But posing for publicity pictures with a guitar (which she did not play), she was dismayed when she was booked as a guitarist, and – claiming she had injured her finger – told jokes instead.
Spotted by film director Alan Parker, she was cast in a television commercial he was making for Cadbury’s Cookies; when she appeared in a second one, five years later, she caught the eye of camp comedian Larry Grayson. He was so impressed that he offered her a part in one of his television shows.
More television work followed, with appearances in programmes ranging from All Creatures Great and Small to Colin Welland’s play Leeds United (1974).
After numerous non-speaking appearances as a warden in Crown Court in 1975, Dawn was offered a bit part in
Coronation Street as Vera Duckworth, making her debut in 1976 and coming and going for several years before becoming a regular character and taking
up residence at 9 Coronation St in 1983. In 1990, she was the subject of This Is Your Life.
Her autobiography, Vera Duckworth:
My Story, was published in 1993 and she appeared in the Royal Variety Performance and in the second Coronation Street feature film, Viva Las
Vegas (2000).
For her work with cancer charities and the Prince’s Trust, for which she helped to raise hundreds of thousands of pounds, Dawn was appointed MBE in 2000.
In 1998, she had an audience with Pope John Paul II in recognition of her charity work.
With her friend Angela Creely, Dawn owned a public house, The Old Grapes, near the Granada Studios in Manchester.
As for her character’s enduring appeal, Dawn would point to the fact that Britain is full of Veras, ‘‘millions of them’’.
‘‘And Vera is who I would have been had I not got on television – she’s somebody that I quite wish I was.’’
Dawn’s first marriage, at the age of 18, ended in divorce in 1959. She is survived by her second husband, Donald, and by their three daughters and a son from her first marriage. – Telegraph Group