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Obituaries
Cambridge don and
renowned historian
Professor Sir Tony Wrigley
Page 54June Brown
Actress best known for playing Dot Cotton, the world-weary, Bible-reading, chain-smoking launderette manager in EastEnders
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 medi-
cal school, so she took to dissecting rab-
bits. “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 demand-
ing acting career.
That career was sinking fast in 1985
when Leslie Grantham (obituary June
15, 2018), who would play the roguish
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 pronuncia-
tion off duty.
Over the next 35 years on the show,
Dot would infuse Dickensian charac-
terisation and vaudeville timing, add-
ing 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 excess-
es, Brown skilfully drew out Dot’s ten-
der side, such as her endless capacity to
give one more chance to her mean-spir-
ited and criminal son, “Nasty” Nick
(played by John Altman) until he finally
succumbed to a heroin overdose in
- 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 Branning 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 Ire-
land where she’ll stay,” Brown said. “I
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 cig-
arettes. “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 ofdetection 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, al-
though 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 to-
gether 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 bring-
ing 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 Cor-
onation 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 I 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 per-
former. 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 fail-
ed as a result of wet macular degenera-
tion, 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 Con-
servative 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 entertain-
ing autobiography, Before the Year Dot.June Brown OBE, actress, was born on
February 16, 1927. She died on April 3,
2022, aged 95ALAMY; ANL/REXJune Brown brought a tragicomic touch to her EastEnders
character Dot Cotton; Brown as a younger actressmy 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 Ital-
ian ancestry, and Henry Brown.
One of her forebears was a famous Jew-
ish 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 fortunewhen 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 devas-
tated 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 loneli-
ness. 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 Leices-
ter. 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 restau-
rant 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 Noël
Coward, directed by Alec Guinness.
As well as being a promising per-
former, Brown was strikingly good-
looking. After the actor Nigel Haw-
thorne 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 escapeHer brother died at 15
days old and one of her
daughters after 16 days
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