The indomitable June Brown insisted, in her latter years, that she had no fear of dying.
It's why she refused to quit her long-term smoking habit, continued drinking wine and Guinness, and merrily went on eating the dark chocolate she was allergic to, but adored.
"What's the point of worrying?" she told the Mirror three years ago. "I could go to sleep tonight and not be here tomorrow. 'Oh dear, June's gone,' they'd say."
She wasn't scared, she explained, because she believed in an afterlife, had her Christian faith, and accepted there was nothing to fear in death. Life, though, was another matter.
Because the OBE, MBE and BAFTA winner, who became a national treasure through the EastEnders role she won a little shy of her 60th birthday, knew better than anyone that it was life where the darkest demons lurked.
Despite the polished smile of the actress who was as dependable a fact of British life as fish and chips or April showers, June's had known more than her fair share of heartache.
While she would stoically deny her life had been tragic, she suffered early and repeated loss – first of her beloved sister, Marise (known as Micie) in childhood, then her first husband, later a baby with her second, and finally finding herself widowed again in 2003.
And so for many decades, it was solitude that proved her biggest fear, manifesting in numerous love affairs and a gnawing need for affection.
In her 2013 autobiography, Before The Year Dot, she wrote: "Too dependent, I found it impossible to be happy alone. I was constantly in and out of love, always looking for the kind of caring that Micie had given me – the wholehearted acceptance of me just as I was. I kept looking for the friend I had lost."
The star was born on February 16, 1927, in rural Suffolk. Her mother was an East Ender and, as the actress would learn on BBC1 show Who Do You Think You Are?, descended from Sephardic Jews – specifically, from the 19th-century bare-knuckle fighter Isaac Bitton.
June was one of five children – though she lost a brother to pneumonia when he was a baby – in a family who lived above their dad’s electrical business.
The event that would transform her character came when she was seven, and Marise eight.
One night in 1934, Marise woke June suffering an earache. Just days later, she was taken to hospital for a mastoid operation, and June never saw her again. June believed infection took hold. Her sister developed meningitis and died.
June recalled movingly in her autobiography: "I can see myself at school outside the classroom saying to my teacher, Miss Downing, in a very ordinary voice, ‘Micie died yesterday’."
The smell of chrysanthemums, the flowers on her sister’s grave, was one she could never bear.
After the tragedy, her father's drinking and parents' physical rows ended the marriage, and her mother, a milliner, left with the remaining children.
During the Second World War, June was first evacuated to Wales, then in the latter years she served with the Wrens.
Later she trained at the Old Vic theatre school and began a successful stage career, including with the Royal Shakespeare Company, in roles including Lady Macbeth and Hedda Gabler.
With a delicate profile and striking dark hair, she wasn't short of admirers. Actor Nigel Hawthorne called her "one of the most beautiful creatures I’ve seen on stage."
For June, relationships with men became a way of filling the void her sister had left. She first fell in love aged 14, with the family’s lodger Belgian Ralph Latimer, 10 years her senior, who worked with her father.
When he went to fight in the war, she held a torch for three years, although he never wrote back. Perhaps it became another void to fill.
She was candid about her open approach to sex. During the war she enjoyed flings, once pretending she was married to a naval sub-lieutenant in order to stay with him in his barracks.
She admitted three affairs with married lovers. One was actor Edward Jewesbury, who she slept with in a field when she was 21, almost making herself late for a performance.
She married her first husband, actor Johnny Garley, in 1953, but once again experienced the most traumatic tragedy when he took his life in 1957.
Initially their relationship had been fun-filled. June recalled hiding Johnny in her boarding house while on tour before their marriage.
But the pair both had affairs, and despite confessing their wrongs the marriage never fully repaired. Johnny threatened suicide a number of times, so when he did take his life, in their bed, while June was out, she blamed herself. Ground down by his depression, she had gone out to spend the evening with a friend.
She returned home to find him unconscious beside a suicide note. She dragged him from bed, but he died in hospital.
Initially, she claimed she had gone out to do ironing, though later in life owned the truth, admitting: "I should never have left him. But I was tired. I couldn’t stand any more."
She said the fact that she “found it hard to be alone” prompted her to marry for a second time soon after.
She met actor Bob Arnold, who starred in Dixon of Dock Green, just months after Johnny’s death. She said: "His strength and calmness were reassuring."
They tied the knot in April 1958 and although the actress later revealed that Bob was rarely affectionate, the pair had six children together. June once said: "The process of having a family was a bit like opening the tumble drier and finding more clothes than you put in!"
But more loss was to follow. Daughter Chloe was premature at 28 weeks, and did not survive.
The couple separated for some time before later reuniting until Bob's death in 2003 from Lewy body dementia, a progressive form of the condition.
Their split coincided with a lull in June's career, and for a time she struggled to make ends meet.
The stage actress began to dabble in television, appearing in three episodes of Coronation Street in 1970-71, and in Play For Today in 1971, as well as in Doctor Who and Minder. But when EastEnders came knocking in 1985, it was a lifeline.
She said: "The year before my being offered the part of Dot was my worst ever – things were getting desperate."
June became the most classically trained star in the cast of the BBC1 soap. Her career there catapulted her to household-name fame, which lasted until her death at the age of 95.
She used her profile for good causes, particularly championing gay rights. In 2012 she became the first patron of the Brighton Gay Men’s Chorus, performing with the group at the Brighton Dome.
The actress did not retire until 2020, despite macular degeneration which caused near-blindness.
In 2019 she conceded: "I haven’t driven for years and I can't really go out socially due to my eyesight." EastEnders, she said, used "big fonts" in their scripts.
"They are very kind, and people do make wonderful allowances for me," she said. "I hope I'm worth it. Well, I suppose if I weren’t they wouldn’t bother, would they?"
