June Brown

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Publication: The Times
Date: 2022-04-05
Author:
Page: 53
Language: English

Actress best known for playing Dot Cotton, the world-weary Bible-reading, chain-smoking launderette manager in EastEnders

June Brown brought a tragicomic touch to her EastEnders character Dot Cotton; Brown as a younger actress

In her teens June Brown wanted to be an osteopath. She hoped that if she did well in chemistry, physics and biology her father might put her through medical school, so she took to dissecting rabbits. "Nowadays people would scream in horror at the thought," she said, "but we were not sentimental about field animals. I loved dissection."

Despite her aspirations, her father was a hard man with a then typical view of women, who said: "I'm not paying for you. You're a girl and you'll only get married." It was a huge disappointment for Brown, who went on anyway to combine motherhood with a demanding acting career.

That career was sinking fast in 1985 when Leslie Grantham (obituary 15, 2018), who would play the rogues pub landlord "Dirty Den" Watts in the BBC TV soap EastEnders, saw Brown in Minder and tipped off the show's producers.

Although her part, a world-weary, Bible-reading launderette manager called Dot Cotton, was intended to be short-lived, she soon became a fixture as viewers took to Dot's tragicomic nature, busybody East End manner and colourful dialogue — in contrast to Brown's clipped, received pronunciation off duty.

Over the next 35 years on the show. Dot would infuse Dickensian characterisation and vaudeville timing, adding much comedy value but also pathos as the upstanding Christian chain-smoking washerwoman, who was decidedly unchristian in many of her bigoted attitudes and scurrilous spreading of gossip around Albert Square. "I could have played Dot as a very dreary woman but I played her with an edge, so it was funny," Brown said.

Underneath the pantomime excesses, Brown skilfully drew out Dot's tender side, such as her endless capacity to give one more chance to her mean-spirited and criminal son, "Nasty" Nick (played by John Altman) until he finally succumbed to a heroin overdose in 2015. She also won acclaim for an episode in 2000 in which, against her beliefs, she helps her old friend Ethel to end her life.

On January 31, 2008, Brown became the first and so far only actor to carry an entire half-hour episode of the soap single-handed. Titled Pretty Baby ..., it consisted of a monologue in which she looked back over Dot's life, dictating into a cassette machine for her husband Jim Bran ning to hear in hospital after a stroke. The performance earned her a British Academy of Film and Television Arts (Bafta) best actress nomination.

As Brown cemented her place as one of Britain's most popular actresses late in life, critics could be backhanded in their compliments. One from The Guardian described her as "Kenneth Williams trapped in the body of Cilla Black".

Her 2020 departure from EastEnders was tinged with controversy as she hinted at disappointment with -recent storylines. "I've sent her [Dot] off to Ireland where she'll stay," Brown said. "1 did make up a limerick. It's a bit dirty: 'I went back to do a good story. Alas and alack, when I got back it had gone up in smoke. I got a small part, a very small part. And that ended up as a big wet fart. Alas and alack, I will never go back.'"

Brown had already taken what turned out to be a four-year break from the show in 1993 amid disputes with scriptwriters over what she perceived as giving into political correctness and making Dot Cotton's character more anodyne as a result.

When Dot returned to the square her attire was as unfashionable as ever, in sharp contrast to the ever-elegant Brown's. The one characteristic she did share with Dot was an addiction to cigarettes. "Dot and I smoke the same: left hand always curved," she said. "I did try one of those new electronic cigarettes but it was so heavy it kept falling out of my mouth. So that went in the bin."

June Muriel Brown was born in Suffolk in 1927, the daughter of Louisa Ann (née Butler), who had Italian ancestry, and Henry Brown.

One of her forebears was a famous Jewish bare knuckle fighter in London's East End.

She was one of five children, although her baby brother John Peter died of pneumonia after 15 days. Many years later Brown gave birth to a child who lived 16 days.

Louisa was a milliner; Henry, a hard drinker who beat his children, traded Asian commodities, lost a fortune when the German mark collapsed in the 1920s, went bankrupt, worked in a yeast factory, and later bought an electrical engineering business.

The family grew up comfortably in the Suffolk village of Needham Market.

When June was seven she was devastated by the death of her eight-year-old sister, Marise, from mastoiditis, an ear infection. "I will never forget it," she said. "I called her Micie — pronounced Meecie — and she was the sun and the moon to me, the kindest, nicest person. Suddenly, I was the eldest with no one to look up to. I've never felt such loneliness. Her death was the defining moment of my life. I've spent my life looking for a companion who could show me the same sort of love. And I've never found anyone to match her." She later thought Micie's death was why she had so many affairs.

June attended St John's Church of England School, nine miles away in Ipswich, and then won a scholarship to Ipswich High School, where she passed the school certificate examinations. During the Second World War she was evacuated for a few months to Leicester. Once the Germans started to bomb Coventry they were safer back home.

When her father became an accounts manager at the yeast factory he was given a 24-year-old Belgian assistant, Ralph Latimer, who came to stay with the family. Brown, then 14, fell for his dark, wavy hair and hazel eyes and called him Raoul, his Antwerp name.

"I fell madly in love," she said. "He told his mother he'd marry me when I turned 16. When I saw him in a restaurant with another woman, I was very distressed." She waited hours for him at Piccadilly Circus underground station but he never turned up and he later married someone else.

At 17 Brown joined the Wrens and was sent to Loch Lomond. which she disliked intensely because she had to wash and clean all day. Although she had done some acting as a child at home and school, in the Wrens she began to act more seriously.

In 1947 she attended the Old Vic theatre school, first appearing as an understudy in Twelfth Night at the New Theatre in St Martin's Lane, now the Noel Coward, directed by Alec Guinness.

As well as being a promising performer, Brown was strikingly good-looking. After the actor Nigel Hawthorne saw her in Hedda Gabler, he called her "one of the most beautiful creatures I've seen on stage".

At rehearsals for Twelfth Night she met her first husband, John Garley. They married in 1950, after having to hide in a cupboard in his room to escape detection by a boarding-house landlady. He took his own life seven years later, suffering from depression. "He gassed himself using the coins I had left him for the gas meter," Brown recalled. "He'd had an affair with another actress, although I was the first to be unfaithful."

Within a year Brown married the actor Robert Arnold, who went on to play Detective Constable Swain in the TV police series Dixon of Dock Green. Despite various flings they were together for 45 years, until his death from Lewy body dementia in 2003. They had six children in seven and a half years, including Chloe, who died in infancy. They named their next daughter after her. "The whole process of having a family was a bit like opening the tumble drier," she said, "and finding more clothes than you put in."

Of the surviving children, William is a compliance consultant and Naomi is a producer. The other daughters, Louise, Chloe and Sophie, live privately.

Brown mixed the demands of bringing up a young family with theatre work before finding more regular roles in the burgeoning 1960s television industry. She was in Z Cars, Doctor Who and Coronation Street before securing bigger parts in the 1970s in the medical soap Angels and the costume drama The Duchess of Duke Street.

"My thirties were ruined by being pregnant," she said. "I loved my babies but I had been quite successful before them, playing Lady Macbeth and Hedda Gabler, one of my favourite roles.

"After that I became a rather below-stairs actor; you wouldn't think of me now in the same way as Maggie Smith in Downton Abbey. It was because I didn't have the money to shop or time to buy clothes, so 1 didn't look smart any more. If you want a role, you have to dress the part."

Brown appeared in several films, including Psychomania (1973), Sunday Bloody Sunday (1971), Straw Dogs (1971), Nijinsky (1980) and the wartime big band comedy Ain't Misbehavin' in 1997. She was later Nannie Slagg in the BBC's big-budget production of Gormenghast and became a regular pantomime performer. At the age of 83 she danced the tango in the 2010 Christmas special of Strictly Come Dancing. Three years later she achieved the seemingly impossible by being more outrageous than Lady Gaga on The Graham Norton Show. The visibly impressed singer was quick to pay homage.

In recent years Brown's eyesight failed as a result of wet macular degeneration, which was developed as a storyline for Dot. A groundbreaking operation in 2017 saved her from going blind, though her eyesight deteriorated again later.

The character's trademark biblical quotations were chosen by Brown, a Christian Scientist who claimed to be a "faith healer". She was a professed Conservative voter, declaring: "My views are politically incorrect. Such as why we allow children to say what they think. It's not how to bring up children."

In 2013 she published her entertaining autobiography, Before the Year Dot.

June Brown OBE, actress, was born on February 16, 1927. She died on April 3, 2022, aged 95

June Brown

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