Anne Kirkbride

Born: June 21, 1954;

Died: January 19, 2015.

Anne Kirkbride, who has died of cancer aged 60, was an actress who, for more than 40 years, played Deirdre Barlow in Coronation Street. The long-running soap opera has always been a matriarchal one with strong, dramatic leading women and Deirdre was one of its strongest and most dramatic.

She was married four times in the soap, twice to Ken Barlow, and was engaged to a conman whose fraud led to her being wrongly imprisoned, an on-screen scandal that was mentioned in the Commons by the then PM Tony Blair and led to the campaign to Free the Weatherfield One.

It was one of the highlights of Deirdre's life - along with the shocking moment Ken discovered she was having an affair with his old enemy Mike Baldwin. The storyline, in the early 1980s, was a talking point around the country, with people talking sides: boring, reliable Ken or dramatic, exciting Mike. In the end, Ken won.

Kirkbride said she was always perfectly happy to play the same character and, unlike some of her co-stars, did not hanker after other television work or stage plays. "Sometimes I think I should have made more of an effort to get out and do other stuff," she once said, "but then again I've never been terribly ambitious."

She was born in Oldham in Lancashire, the daughter of painter and decorator Jack Kirkbride and his wife Enid, and first developed her taste for acting in a junior theatre club. After Oldham Youth Theatre, she took a job at Oldham Rep as an assistant stage manager, which was then one of the traditional routes into acting. The main requirements of the job were to buy props and build sets, but she would also be given the occasional acting job.

Eventually, she became a full-time actor at Oldham Rep and began to get pieces of work on television. She first came to the notice of Granada, who made Coronation Street, when she appeared in the ITV series Another Sunday and Sweet FA, and won the small part of Deirdre Hunt, a dolly bird who was spotted drinking in the Rovers.

After proving popular during her brief appearances, Kirkbride signed a contract with the Street in 1974 and never left. Her first significant relationship on screen was with the troublemaker Ray Langton, with whom she had a daughter Tracy. She then married Ken in the same week in 1981 as Prince Charles married Diana, but two years later, Deirdre's affair with Mike almost ended the marriage.

The marriage eventually broke up when Ken had an affair and Deirdre married for the third time, to a waiter she met on holiday. After his death, she and Ken were reconciled. In real life, she and William Roache, who played Ken, were good friends and she gave evidence in his defence at his trial for sex assault charges last year (he was found not guilty).

In 1993, she took a break from the Street when she was diagnosed with non-Hodgkin's lymphoma and later suffered from depression. "Life became unbearable, absolutely intolerable," she said. "I wanted to die ... because you just don't want to go on living feeling like that. But you're frightened that if you die you might still feel like that on the other side. There's no escape."

Kirkbride had recently been off screen again after taking a break in September and died this week in a Manchester hospital.

She is survived by her husband David Beckett, whom she married in 1992 (he played Deirdre's handyman boyfriend Dave Barton in the soap), her brother John, and his family.