When Coronation Street began in December 1960, Tony Warren’s television creation instantly made its mark with distinctive, believable characters such as Ena Sharples, Elsie Tanner, Annie Walker, Albert Tatlock and Ken Barlow who portrayed life in a working-class back street in the north of England. Around them, Warren peopled the cobbles of the fictional Weatherfield with other equally authentic “residents” in one of television’s first contributions to the social-realist revolution that was already under way on stage and in the cinema.
Angela Crow, who has died aged 86, joined the ITV serial for episode 12, screened in January 1961, as the 19-year-old Doreen Lostock, a machinist at Elliston’s raincoat factory in Victoria Street. The ritual of Doreen and her workmate Sheila Birtles (played by Eileen Mayers) buying their favourite lunch from Florrie Lindley’s corner shop earned them the nickname the “barm cake girls”, a term that fixed the soap in time and place.
When her supervisor at work, Harold Pilkington (Philip Anthony), groped her, Doreen called him out in front of her fellow workers. He gave her a week’s notice, but she left on the spot. She subsequently worked behind the bar at the Rovers Return pub, having fallen for Billy Walker (Ken Farrington), son of the publican Annie (Doris Speed), and at Gamma Garments, a clothes shop managed by Leonard Swindley (Arthur Lowe), with Emily Nugent (Eileen Derbyshire) as senior assistant. The trio were given plenty of opportunity to perform comedy, notably when Swindley had the women modelling new stock in the shop and on television.
When Doreen said “ecky thump”, which was her response to all manner of situations, sad or humorous, it came across not so much as a stereotype of northern people as an affirmation of their identity.
Doreen and Sheila eventually rented the flat above the corner shop and, in jiving to the music on their transistor radios and spending their nights on the town in search of boyfriends, represented the opening up of the swinging 60s. However, in 1963, Doreen decided there was life beyond Weatherfield and left to “join the flippin’ army and see the flippin’ world”, heading for the Women’s Royal Army Corps to become a tank driver.
Crow had completed 145 episodes between 1961 and 1963, with a break in the middle when those Coronation Street actors not on contract took part in a seven-month strike by Equity members.
Like Doreen, Crow said she wanted to “get out there and see the world”, explaining: “I wanted to do Ibsen and Chekhov. I’d had to turn down two meaty parts in the new-wave films [and] it was an exciting time of change in the theatre.”
Alongside her stage work, Crow was later in a programme fondly remembered by a whole new generation of viewers. In the BBC children’s sitcom Potter’s Picture Palace (1976-78), Crow played Joan Biddie, receptionist and usherette at a cinema being restored to its former glory by the manager, Peter Potter (Eden Phillips), who had inherited it from his aunt.
Crow was born in Horsforth, which was then in the West Riding of Yorkshire, to Alice (nee Whalley) and WB (William) Crow. Her father was an author of books on the occult who became a biology lecturer at Leicester College of Technology. Crow’s acting career began when she played truant from Alderman Newton’s girls’ school, Leicester, to appear in Jane Eyre with a touring company. She then trained at Rada in London, where she won the Tree and Emile Littler awards. After graduating in 1954, she gained experience in repertory theatres.
She made an early stage appearance as Maria in Twelfth Night at Regent’s Park Open Air theatre in 1956, and then her big break came with the role of Lily Smalls in the original West End production of Dylan Thomas’s Under Milk Wood, adapted from his radio play, at the New (now Noel Coward) theatre (1956-57), which BBC television recorded for a 1957 broadcast.
As well as parts in TV plays before joining Coronation Street, Crow had roles in classic serials: she was Nina Fawn in The Eustace Diamonds (1959), Charley in Bleak House (1959) and Betsy in Barnaby Rudge (1960). She also played a housemaid in The Pianist episode of the classic TV sitcom Hancock’s Half Hour in 1957.
Later, she was a busy screen character actor, switching between drama and comedy. She had a regular role as Cissie Ludgrove, Irene Handl’s assistant at a hairdressing salon, in the sitcom Barney Is My Darling (1966) and played Calpurnia, the Roman general’s last wife, in Heil Caesar! (1973). There was also the part of Liz Stride, believed to be one of the serial killer’s victims, in Jack the Ripper (1988), a miniseries starring Michael Caine as the Scotland Yard inspector Frederick Abberline.
On the West End stage, Crow was Dorothy in the writer Richard Harris’s play Stepping Out in 1986 (Duke of York’s theatre) and Rummy Mitchens in George Bernard Shaw’s Major Barbara, directed by Peter Hall (Piccadilly theatre, 1998). She also played Lizzie in Edna O’Brien’s play A Pagan Place at the Royal Court theatre (1972) and Jane, the long-suffering wife of Sidney Hopcroft, in Alan Ayckbourn’s Absurd Person Singular at the Royal Lyceum, Edinburgh (1981-82).
In retirement, living in West Yorkshire, she was a keen member of the Brontë Society, gave talks about the Brontë family and wrote the book Miss Branwell’s Companion (2007).
In 2005, Crow married Michael Woods. He died of cancer the following year. She is survived by her son, Jonathan, from her earlier relationship with John La Thangue.
• Angela Rosemary Crow, actor, born 13 December 1935; died 3 March 2022
• This article was amended on 24 March 2022. An earlier version described Julius Caesar as Roman emperor.
