Man-eating role brought fame and fury
Carolyn Jones Soap actress BORN APRIL 18, 1941 - DIED JULY 25, 2018, AGED 77
WHEN Carolyn Jones joined the cast of Crossroads as garage secretary Sharon Metcalfe in 1977, the ITV soap attracted more than 18 million viewers every week.
Her character, the “tart with a heart”, bedded several soap stalwarts and viewers were enthralled by her antics.
Yet some couldn’t separate Jones from her on-screen persona. So much so that she once recalled being chased up a street by a group of “furious, fraught ladies with very sharp umbrellas” when her character had implied that a fellow employee might have committed a murder in a whodunnit storyline.
Born in Vancouver, Canada, Jones was the daughter of Reg, a journalist and Jean, a school secretary. After being educated at Vancouver High School, Jones left for London at the age of 17, with the dream of becoming an actress.
She worked hard to lose her Canadian accent and won a place at the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art in 1960. She studied there for two years and then honed her craft in rep before progressing to Laurence Olivier’s National Theatre Company at the Old Vic in 1964, where her contemporaries included Albert Finney, Derek Jacobi and Maggie Smith. There Jones landed small stage roles in productions such as the 1965 productions Much Ado About Nothing with Ian McKellen and Armstrong’s Last Goodnight.
Her West End debut came three years later when she starred in Oh! Calcutta! and she had a minor film role in The Devils in 1971.
While Jones enjoyed a modestly successful stage career, she became a household name when she joined Crossroads. The audience soon became endeared to Jones who from 1981 became one of the soap’s leading strong women.
Jones’ character was written out of the series when Sharon left to become a special-needs teacher.
Returning to the stage, Jones starred as Grace Holland in the 1989 production Bus Stop and landed a handful off one-off television roles in soaps such as EastEnders, Holby City and Doctors. Her second most memorable role came in 2016 in BBC Radio 4’s The Archers. For two years she played the villainous Ursula Titchener, gaining the nickname “Cursula”.
She married Jeremy Mason, whose father had been one of The Archers’ original creators in 1969, but the couple divorced after 12 years. She had no children.
Jones died following a battle with lung cancer.