Remembering Elizabeth Dawn: Coronation Street star who came to define a generation

Vera Duckworth was more than a mere soap opera character, David Barnett says. She came to be her own person – and one that Britons happily invited into their homes and hearts for more than three decades

Former Prime Minister Tony Blair accepts a kiss from the television star, who played Vera for 34 years (Reuters)

This is the North, which is the best of England, a place where hearts glow foundry-hot, where the backbone of the nation divides God’s own white rose country from the red rose land where women die of love.

Coronation Street is the best of the North, this liminal space made real by time and repeated viewing, where the bones of lives are given form on typewriter and laptop, and given flesh by words spoken from mouths as familiar as those of our own family.

And this is Vera Duckworth, who was the best of Coronation Street, a woman who lived and breathed and had dreams, and saw those dreams relentlessly dashed on the cobbles of that place, but who picked herself up from amid the pieces of those dreams and dared to dream again, and again.

Coronation Street is more than the faintly-praised damnation of a “soap opera”, Vera Duckworth was more than a mere “character”, and Liz Dawn, who portrayed Vera on screen for 34 years and who has died, aged 77, was never just an actor. That implies a job, a temporary inhabiting of a role, a measure of artifice and fakery.

Liz Dawn wore Vera Duckworth as comfortably as she might wear a sewing factory tabard or a perfume – Charlie, perhaps, or Poison – and there was never any sense, during those 34 years, that Dawn hung up the Vera persona at the end of the working day along with the tabard. Liz Dawn was Vera Duckworth, and that’s all there was to it.

Jack (left) and Vera Duckworth (Bill Tarmey and Liz Dawn) meet up with Street veteran Ray Langton in September 1997 (Neville Buswell) (PA)

I grew up with Vera and her on-screen husband Jack, played by Bill Tarmey, who died five years ago. They were the mainstays of Coronation Street, the centre around which the myriad storylines revolved, sometimes intersecting with them, other times whirling around Jack and Vera who remained at the eye of the plots which blew in and out with hurricane ferocity.

But there was never calm at the eye of the hurricane, not properly. Jack and Vera were often the much-needed comedy relief to ease the tension and ignominy heaped upon other characters; but the humour was never forced or less than the natural funniness of northern folk. Equally, the scriptwriters put Vera and Jack through the mill with alarming frequency, but the pathos and tragedy was never sentimental or trite.

They embodied the north, its grit and its aspirations, its humanity and its faults, its desire to be treated fairly, yet to get ahead. They got knocked down, but they got up again. Every time.

Witness the story when Jack joined a dating club; and disguised himself in wig and French accent to record a video. Egged on by Corrie maven Bet Lynch, Vera signs up to the same programme and sees her errant husband's turn as “Vince St Clair”. Revenge is plotted, served ice-cold; Jack turns up for a date with a bewigged Vera, posing as a merry widow, who turns around at the last second to reveal her true self.

Low comedy, perhaps, but funny because it’s plausible, and true. And like all good comedy, the laughs are wrapped around a nugget of tragedy; that Jack would stray at all, that Vera would be talked into doing the same.

The Duckworths were never the noble patriarch and matriarch of the Street; their lives were messy and chaotic and filled with the tensions of ordinary married life. Jack loved his pigeons; Vera hated them. Jack liked a flutter on the horses; he never won, they never had money. When they were of one mind, it was generally in despair at their ne’er-do-well son Terry.

I first saw Liz Dawn and Bill Tarmey in real life not long after I’d started work as a journalist, at the end of the 1980s. They were the star attraction at a carnival day near Chorley which I was covering, and the crowds flocked to see them. Liz cut off Bill’s tie on the stage with a pair of scissors, aping a scene in a recent episode when Jack had done something or other to raise Vera’s ire.

But people weren’t turning up to see Liz and Bill. They were there to see Vera and Jack. And that’s who they got. They stayed in character, effortlessly, both on stage and off. Effortlessly, because there was so much of themselves in Jack and Vera, so much of their own northern wit and warmth.


 The Queen meets Dawn at the ITV 50th Anniversary celebration in 2005 
 (PA)

Liz Dawn was born Sylvia Butterfield on 8 November, 1939, in Leeds. She began as a nightclub singer, graduating to small parts in TV dramas such as Z-Cars and All Creatures Great and Small, before landing what was meant to be a bit part as Vera in Corrie in 1974, a factory worker in what was then the Street’s primary employer, a mail-order warehouse.

But Vera, at first nothing more than a straight-talking foil to sour-faced old Ivy Tyldesley, grew in popularity and became a regular fixture, the writers introducing Jack in 1979 and by 1983 the pair had moved into number nine.

Life in soap-land is a roller-coaster, of course, and fortunes are made and broken at the whim of the writers’ room. In the 1990s a windfall, the sort that only happens in serial drama, gave the Duckworths the opportunities to turn gamekeepers from poachers, and buy the Rovers Return, the pub that anchors Coronation Street, and Vera had a shot at being the queen of the Street for a few years… Only right, given that a previous storyline had revealed she was, in fact, the second cousin one removed of the actual Queen, by dint of her long-lost father turning up and revealing they were a branch of the family sprouting from the illegitimate progeny of Edward VII.

But as the wheel of fortune turned and turned and the Duckworths were up one year, down the next, one ambition remained constant for Vera: retiring to Blackpool, that Mecca of golden sands and bingo halls, that northern paradise, that dream that seemed eminently attainable yet always just so out of reach.

Coronation Street stars (from the left) Bill Tarmey, Liz Dawn, Daryl Edwards, Sean Wilson, Helen Worth, Lyndsay King and Thomas Ormson (PA)

Ten years ago, it was announced that Liz Dawn had asked to be written out of Coronation Street after being diagnosed, four years earlier, with emphysema. The end for Vera came in January 2008. The gods in the writers’ room had at last decreed that the dream of Blackpool was finally within the Duckworths’ grasp; after seeing the house to which she would retire, Vera had a doze in her favourite chair and never woke up.

Two years later, Jack died in the very same chair. Liz Dawn reprised the role of Vera one last time, as a ghost come to have one final waltz with Jack. If that sounds hokey or unlikely, then you should watch it. Only those with a heart of pure limestone could fail to be moved.

It was announced on Tuesday that Liz Dawn had died, peacefully, just like Vera, on Monday night.

Here in the north, we’re the best of Britain, and Coronation Street shows us at the best that we can be – funny and sad and heartfelt and caring. Vera Duckworth, for all her faults, for all the tragedy and comedy and shattered dreams, was the heart of Coronation Street.

Liz Dawn was the best Vera – the only Vera – there could have been, and that made her the best of Corrie, and the best of the north, and, ultimately, the best of us all.