June Brown
Actress
JUNE BROWN, who has died at 95, was the backbone of one of Britain’s best loved soaps.
As Dot Cotton, also known as Dot Branning, in the longrunning EastEnders, she provided Albert Square with one of its best-loved and most memorable characters.
For many viewers, her cockney creation felt like a family member who appeared, with regularity, four times a week on BBC One.
She became a British cultural fixture, winning several awards and a Bafta nomination, as well as being awarded an MBE in 2008 for her services to drama and charity and later an OBE.
But it was a career of two halves – and as a theatre actor, she cut a very different figure, prompting the late actor Nigel Hawthorne to describe her as “one of the most beautiful creatures I’ve seen on stage” after seeing her play the titular role in Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler when she was in her 20s.
Yet it was the chainsmoking Cotton who was to define her.
Off-stage, she was different again – a thoughtful woman who preferred to watch Newsnight and Panorama to EastEnders.
Her politics were equally unbending. “I wouldn’t vote Labour, dear, if you paid me,” she told an interviewer. “I vote Conservative.”
June Muriel Brown grew up in Suffolk, nearly 200 miles from the fictional Albert Square in east London.
Born in Needham Market in 1927, she was one of five.
Her baby brother died at 15 days from pneumonia and her elder sister, Marise, died aged eight from a meningitis-like illness.
She would later discover during filming for Who Do You Think You Are? that she was of Irish, Scottish, Italian and Sephardic descent.
On her maternal grandmother’s side she was descended from the famous bare knuckle boxer Isaac Bitton, who reportedly once took part in a fight that lasted 74 rounds.
Educated in Ipswich at St John’s Church of England school, she then won a scholarship to Ipswich High School.
During the Second World War she served in the women’s branch of the Royal Navy, the Wrens. After the hostilities ended, she went to the Old Vic Theatre School in London, hoping to launch a career on the stage.
The 1970s and early 80s saw her take small roles in Coronation Street, Mrs Parsons, Doctor Who and The Bill. She was also featured in Yorkshire television’s adaptation of Winifred Holtby’s depression-era novel South Riding, set in a fictional corner of East Yorkshire.
In the 80s and 90s she secured larger parts in comedies like Ain’t Misbehavin’ (1997) and played Nanny Slagg in the BBC’s adaptation of Gormenghast in 2000.
But these were eclipsed by her ubiquitous performance as Dot Cotton. The part was offered to her by one of the show’s original cast, Leslie Grantham, who played the equally well-known “Dirty” Den Watts.
On his recommendation she joined the cast in 1985, taking a break between 1993 and 1997.
In 2008 she became the first EastEnders actress to carry an entire episode single-handed. In it, Cotton dictated her life story to a cassette, so her husband could listen to it in hospital following a stroke.
This was made more poignant by the fact that her co-star and close friend, John Bardon, was then in hospital after also suffering a stroke.
It took Brown more than one attempt to find lasting love.
Aged 23 she met actor John Garley at the Old Vic and they soon married.
Garley took his own life seven years later in 1957. He had been suffering from depression but Brown expressed her guilt at having been unfaithful during their time together.
The next year Brown married again and this time the relationship would last 45 years. Robert Arnold played Pc Swain in the long-running Dixon Of Dock Green and they had their first child, Louise, in 1959.
Soon after she fell pregnant again but the baby, Chloe, was born prematurely and died after 16 days.
She had another four children and Arnold died in 2003 of Lewy body dementia, a progressive form of the brain disease.
Foreshadowing her eventual decline in a 2017 episode of Desert Island Discs, Brown told host Kirsty Young that she thought retirement would kill her.
“I can be feeling like death warmed up when I come in (to work), and then I’m alive. It keeps me alive,” she said weeks before turning 90.
“I think that’s why a lot of people are very lonely and get ill when they’re older, because I think loneliness and having no motivation, nothing to work towards – I think it kills you.”
In December 2021 Brown was made an OBE in the New Year Honours, as she was recognised for services to drama and to charity.
She was previously made an MBE in the Queen’s Birthday Honours in 2008 for services to drama and charity.
She is survived by five children from her second marriage.