Kathryn Apanowicz, who has died aged 64 after a long illness, was a child performer who grew up to find her best roles as an actor in three TV soaps. From playing a bullying nurse at a London hospital in Angels, she created further drama in EastEnders as one of “Dirty” Den Watts’s lovers, then moved back to her native Yorkshire to take the part of a newspaper reporter in Emmerdale.
Her talent was discovered by Jess Yates, producer of the ITV children’s show Junior Showtime. She started singing and dancing in the series at the age of eight shortly after it began in 1969. Over the next six years, she appeared alongside future stars such as Bonnie Langford, Joe Longthorne and Keigh Chegwin. With Mark Curry, she was also one of the programme’s young presenters.
Later, Apanowicz became a familiar face to older viewers in Angels. She joined the BBC serial as Rose Butchins in 1979, when it was switching to a twice-weekly, half-hour format after four years as a weekly drama about student nurses at the fictitious St Angela’s hospital, Battersea.
Alcoholism and sexual promiscuity among the staff were issues that gave it a harder edge than previous hospital programmes. Real-life nurses complained that their television counterparts were idle, coarse and insensitive, and Rose – who ended up in court on an assault charge when Apanowicz’s run in the soap finished in 1981 – came in for particular criticism.
Julia Smith, the producer, defended the gritty realism and later, as co-creator of EastEnders, cast Apanowicz in the cockney soap as the yuppie caterer Magda Czajkowski – half-Polish, half-Yorkshire, like the actor herself.
Her year in Albert Square (1987-88) began with “Mags” arriving at the Queen Vic pub to arrange Debbie Wilkins’s engagement party. Soon, she was in bed with the landlord, Den (Leslie Grantham). When she tired of his possessiveness, she fell for his barman, Simon Wicks (Nick Berry), leading Den to punch “Wicksy” and sack him.
Den eventually gained his revenge by manipulating Wicksy to move on to other women and, feigning sympathy, talking Mags into bed. He then humiliated her by walking off before he could undress, saying he had an errand to run, and instructing her ex’s mother, Pat Wicks, to inform her that he was otherwise engaged. Mags and her Symphony Foods business soon left Walford.
Later, as the Hotten Courier journalist Helen Ackroyd in Emmerdale, on and off between 1995 and 1998, Apanowicz was in a relationship with Terry Woods, the Woolpack pub’s manager, following his marriage breakup.
In real life, she was, for more than a decade until his death in 2005, the partner of Richard Whiteley, the original presenter of the Channel 4 gameshow Countdown.
The couple had first dated when she was 18 and presenting a regional children’s show for Yorkshire Television, and he was a 34-year-old news presenter at the Leeds-based ITV company.
They then drifted apart when she moved to London to further her acting career. “Dick and I never lost touch and between relationships, and sometimes during, continued our affair,” she wrote in her 2006 memoir Richard by Kathryn: The Life of Richard Whiteley. “Twenty years after we met, our relationship became much more serious.”
She was born in Pudsey, in the West Riding of Yorkshire, and brought up in Farsley. Her mother, Marjorie (nee Hunter), owned a hairdresser’s salon in Armley, while her father, Wladyslaw Apanowicz, worked in a bakery in Bradford. He had been born in Lithuania before moving to Poland, where he was an instrument mechanic with its air force during the second world war, then emigrating to Britain.
Classes at the Jean Pearce School of Dance in Leeds led to Apanowicz appearing in Junior Showtime, and she was educated at the girls’ school St Joseph’s Catholic college, Bradford.
After her stint on Junior Showtime, produced by Yorkshire Television, she and Curry had parts as a theatre producer and his assistant – complete with American accents – in the film Bugsy Malone, the 1976 comedy gangster musical directed by Alan Parker, with children taking adult roles.
They then returned to Leeds to host the Saturday-morning show Calendar Kids (1977-78). Around the same time, she made her television acting debut, aged 16, in two episodes of the ITV afternoon soap Rooms in 1977.
While in Angels, she had parts in two television plays, The Black Stuff (1980), which preceded Alan Bleasdale’s landmark series, and Happy Since I Met You (1981), a comedy written by Victoria Wood.
Before playing Helen Ackroyd in Emmerdale, she was heard in the serial in 1992 as a local radio DJ, Dezzy Bell. Her other soap appearances included a single episode of Coronation Street in 1995 playing Carol Starkey, a barmaid doing a one-night trial at the Rovers Return. Miserable and cold with the locals, Carol finished her shift by telling Jack Duckworth, then the pub’s landlord, that a trial worked both ways and she was turning down the job.
Apanowicz was also in Hollyoaks in 1996, as a medium visited by friends of Natasha Andersen, who died after her drink was spiked.
Three years earlier, she started hosting the magazine programme Afternoon Live (1993-94) on the cable channel Wire TV. Then, in 2000, she was a presenter of the ITV daytime show Live Talk, the original title of Loose Women.
She was also the first presenter heard on the newly opened Minster FM commercial radio station in York in 1992. Over the next three decades, she had stints on the local BBC stations in York and Leeds.
Apanowicz’s other TV acting roles included the mother of Lesley Ann Downey in the 1995 dramatised documentary Beyond Grief: The Moors Murders Remembered. She appeared in Dictionary Corner on Countdown, alongside Whiteley, between 2001 and 2005.
She is survived by her nephew, John, and nieces, Louisa and Georgina.
• Kathryn Louise Apanowicz, actor and broadcaster, born 3 June 1960; died 3 March 2025
