She had been a smoker since she was a teenager and, jokingly, her blood was the color of nicotine, so something would kill her soon enough – why bother to quit? He maintained the same attitude at work. After eight decades in theater and television, she would not know what else to do with herself. “Even though I feel like death has warmed up, I find that when I get on set, my energy comes,” said Brown, a favorite of the disapprovers, quoting the Bible by Dot Cotton (later Dot Branning), queen of the Albert Square washing machine in EastEnders . . June, who died at her home in Surrey on Sunday at the age of 95, lived a life full of grief. She refused to take out her cigarettes, even appearing on an appearance on the Graham Norton Show in 2013 to promote her autobiography with a log in one hand. A guest guest that night was Stefani Germanotta, nicknamed Lady Gaga, who was immediately overwhelmed by June’s arrogant recklessness. Johnny turned down an invitation to go to nightclubs with the pop goddess on the grounds that she had another chat show the next day and intended to be on time and come off. That was the other side of June Brown’s character – he was a professional up to the smoke-stained fingertips. Soap Legend: June Brown as Dot Cotton on BBC1 EastEnders This combination of outrageously unconventional and stoically credible enabled her to enjoy a career spanning from Old Vic and the Royal Shakespeare Company after World War II, to repeated panel appearances such as Loose Women in 90 της. Her attitude in everything was relentlessly a matter of reality. He did not have time for stage horror, for example. During a brief stint on Coronation Street in the 1970s, she asked William Roache (played by Ken Barlow) why so many on the cast seemed anxious, and he told her that her nerves were getting worse with age. “I thought, ‘What a waste of time,’ and I decided never to be nervous again,” he said. She never forgot her theatrical training, once pointing to Terry Wogan in a conversation in the 1980s with a breathing technique she had learned from her song coach at the Glyndebourne Opera. He called it “fish gills – a way of breathing that was not just about the diaphragm. We had to use the base of our back, like a toilet that is rinsed from a cistern, the water goes down into the bowl and suddenly it rinses from all sides “. This gave her a voice of great power, although the moment she came to play Dot was a ramp. Usually, he did not blame the cigarettes, but “a lot of TV work, not enough acting in big theaters”. Another contradictory aspect of her character was her willingness to take responsibility for the mistakes of others, telling EastEnders co-stars to blame her for anything that went wrong. “Just tell them it’s me, dear,” he said. “I’m telling everyone to say that – just blame me.” But in her life, she often blamed fate. Preventive by nature, she discovered the reading of the palm at the age of 16 and throughout her life she was convinced that the sudden changes in her fate were due to a broken “line of fate” that split in two, in the middle of the palm of her right hand. of. She continued to read the palms of her friends for many years and sometimes sought out old theater colleagues to find out if her predictions had come true. She blamed her unstable love life for the death of her sister, Micie, in 1934. June was seven, Micie (pronounced Meecie) a year older. The two girls were devoted to each other, sharing a room in the attic of the family home in Suffolk’s Needham Market. She refused to take out her cigarettes, even appearing on an appearance on the Graham Norton Show in 2013 to promote her autobiography with a log in one hand. Her colleague invited that night was Stefani Germanotta, nicknamed Lady Gaga, (photo together) who immediately suffered from June’s arrogant arrogance Johnny remembered being sent to school one morning, with her older sister stuck sick in their parents’ bed. Their grandmother looked inside the room and said, “There is a child who is dying!” Within days, Micie had died of meningitis. Her coffin was placed in the living room, although June and her sister, Rosebad, were not allowed to see it. Micie was buried in the children’s section of Ipswich Cemetery, along with their brother, John Peter, who had died of pneumonia just 15 days ago. “Her loss affected my whole character and shaped the way I behaved for a long time,” he wrote. In particular, it affected my expectations for men. Too addicted, it seemed impossible to be happy alone. “I was always inside and without love, I was always looking for the kind of care that Micie had given me.” Their grandmother blamed June’s father, Henry, who drank a lot, for Missy’s death. A beating had caused the latest illness, he said. When June’s parents divorced, she and her mother, Louise, moved in with their grandmother. Henry returned to order them a house and his mother-in-law punched him in the nose, breaking his glasses. June hoped to train as a doctor, but after her father went bankrupt, there was no money for college. This was a blow because it was always a hand with a scalpel. As a child, he used to dissect wild rabbits, putting them in a cookie cutter to aerate them before cutting them. “Today, people would scream in terror at the thought,” he said. “But we were not emotional with the field animals.” The first romance of June came early. At the age of 14 she fell in love with a Belgian refugee named Ralph, who was ten years her senior. She called him Raoul, he called her Juanita, and after enlisting in the British Medical Corps they exchanged passionate letters for four years. When she stopped writing, it broke her heart. Finally, after months of silence, she received a greeting card from him. He said coldly, “Best wishes for Christmas, Raoul.” June joined the Women Royal Navy [WRNS] and followed by a series of lively affairs, first with a young officer named Colin, then with a Canadian pilot named Glen who “taught me to drive west style, steering wheel in left hand, right hand ready to shoot or throw lasso”. After leaving the WRNS, she did not particularly enjoy work and it was her younger sister, Rosebud, who encouraged her to apply to the Old Vic Theater School in 1947, which she did successfully. Three years later she married a fellow actor, Johnny Garley. Neither of them was faithful, before or after the wedding, but while Johnny was taking matters into her own hands, Johnny became depressed. June, who died at her home in Surrey on Sunday at the age of 95, lived a life of defiance of grief. In 1957, at the age of 30, he committed suicide the next day, threatening June with a knife. He returned to their apartment to find that he had closed the doors and windows, turned on the gas and lay down to die. A suicide note was written on the back of a page from a script. She remarried the following year to Robert Arnold, also an actor, and had six babies in seven years. “I used to take the kids to work with me,” he said. The youngest was sitting in a pram in the dressing room of the theater while she was on stage. He pursued a steady career in repertory theater and later as a television character – including roles in Z Cars, Doctor Who, Dixon Of Dock Green and The Duchess Of Duke Street. He also won praise on stage as Hedda Gabler and Lady Macbeth. But she did not become well-known until she was 60 when EastEnders star Leslie Grantham – better known as Dirty Den – introduced her to the role of Dot, the stern Christian mother of Cockney’s bad boy, Nick Cotton (John Altman). . She played Dot for more than 30 years, with stories that became the talk of the town – including the episode where she helped her ex-girlfriend Ethel (Gretchen Franklin) die of an overdose of morphine, and another episode in which she survived an assassination attempt. of Nick. her. He later saw Nick die from an overdose of heroin he had bought. “I did not call the ambulance,” she told him. “I prayed to let Jesus decide if the world was better off without you.” But her most famous episode came in 2008, with a monologue in which she dictated her life story on a cassette about her husband, who had suffered a stroke. No soap had ever spent an entire half hour on a character, and the show won a Bafta nomination in June. The following year, she was awarded the MBE, with an OBE following in 2021. The rest of the cast considered it a faint recognition of her talents, and Adam Woodiat, who plays Ian Bill, once revealed that they had campaigned to do so. a Dame. Shortly afterwards, she appeared in a West End production of Calendar Girls, naked for the photo shoot with a knitting bag tied to maintain her modesty. Her husband, Robert, with whom she had been married for 45 years, died in 2003, but the widowhood did not affect the rate of her work – dancing a tango at a special Christmas party, for example, when she was 83 years old. Nor did her enjoyment of stirring up the evils subside. In 2009, he happily told a Guardian reporter that he always voted for Tory: “I would not vote for Labor, my dear, if you paid me.” She left EastEnders in 2020, but never lost her gift for the provocative one-liner. “I want to be buried in the sea,” he said. “The Britannia Shipping Company leaves you around the Isle of Wight. I will be in a nice white nightgown and they will wrap you in a coffin made of balsa wood and they will weigh it “. Better to have space for a pack of cigarettes.
