Winifred’s secret of long life aged 108? Look on bright side
A GREAT grandmother celebrating her 108th birthday owes her long life to being an optimist, says her daughter.
Winifred Burgoyne has lived through 26 prime ministers, 24 Olympic Games and two world wars.
Mrs Burgoyne, who worked as a weaver at a Manchester mill for many years, has a daughter, two grandchildren and two great-grandchildren.
Her husband Ronald, who she met at a dance in the 1940s, passed away in 2000.
Mrs Burgoyne moved into Bakewells Care Home, in Bolton, in 2015, with her 108th birthday party held at the home.
Daughter Linda said: “I’m so proud of her. She has a very bright outlook on life. I think that’s what has kept her going so long.
“She’s full of optimism.”
Linda added: “My mum is also a very strong and feisty character.
“Being born at the time she was, I think that helped her make the best of things.”
DEBRA Stephenson isn’t exactly what she seems. She can’t be. Behind the gentle, eye-catching exterior, there has to lurk a sliver of steel. How otherwise could she skewer so mercilessly the slew of famous names she so impressively impersonates?
She’s always been musical, which might help to explain why she’s got such an uncanny knack of picking up accents and nailing vocal imitations of people in the public eye.
Close your eyes and it really could be Lorraine Kelly or Paloma Faith or Theresa May sitting in front of you.
Debra explains: “My dad always did impressions – Mickey Mouse, Steptoe and Son, Denis Healey – to amuse me as I was growing up.
“When I was six, he taught me to do Margaret Thatcher. Then the first record I had was Wuthering Heights by Kate Bush so I’d sit in my bedroom for hours imitating her voice.
“I’d go to my grandma’s and listen to her record collection on her radiogram: Cleo Laine, Barbra Streisand, Shirley Bassey – still a personal favourite – Cilla Black, Sandie Shaw and so on.”
She adds: “By the time I was 10, I was doing a good Pam Ayres. I asked if I could enter the school talent contest with my impressions of Ruth Madoc and Su Pollard from Hi-de-Hi! and Dame Edna. I didn’t win but I loved the laughter.”
When she came second in a local contest, the only child among adult performers, she got a booking to entertain a live audience in a club.
“I was nervous, of course; I wasn’t quite 13. But I enjoyed the adrenaline rush,” she says.
The only time she was reduced to a tearful wreck was the grand final of Opportunity Knocks: “It was live at the Palladium with a TV audience of something like 16million.
“I was 15. I felt I couldn’t use material I’d used in earlier heats. So I didn’t do my best impressions.”
Bob Monkhouse was the presenter and, indirectly, he gave Debra a useful piece of advice. She said: “In a newspaper interview, he said he thought I could have a good career but I needed to diversify because there might not be enough work as an impressionist. It was something I kept in
mind – and then I went to drama school in Manchester.”
Monkhouse was on the money, as Debra’s subsequent career has proved. Interspersed among the many impressions shows – Newzoids, Dead Ringers and The Imitation Game with Rory Bremner and Alexander Armstrong – have been a string of dramatic roles.
She was ditsy Diane Powell in Kay Mellor’s women’s football story Playing the Field and Frankie Baldwin opposite Bradley Walsh for two years in Corrie. But perhaps most memorably of all, she was psychotic Shell Dockley in prison saga Bad Girls.
Debra says: “People often wonder if I’m asked to do impressions in the street. But I’m not. What everyone still seems to want to talk about is Bad Girls. It was definitely my most fun role. It allowed me to play the full range of emotions: everything from devious to vulnerable. And yet, no matter how bad she was, viewers nonetheless felt empathy with her.”
IT ALSO led to perhaps her most challenging role of all. For a TV documentary called Prisoner X, she was incarcerated in an American prison for four days. “It was quite an eye-opener, I can tell you,” she says. “The story that tore me in half was of a woman I spoke to who’d given birth in prison and had the baby taken from her before she’d even had the chance to hold him. She was awaiting trial and no one paid her bail so she was alone in a prison cell recovering from a caesarean section. And she never saw her baby again.”
The woman’s plight cut Debra to the core because, not too long beforehand, her Bad Girls character had given birth in prison and had her baby removed. What gave filming an extra frisson was that Debra herself was six weeks