Obituary - Jean Alexander, actress who played Hilda Ogden in Coronation Street

Died: October 14, 2016

JEAN Alexander, who has died aged 90, was a popular actress who, as the singing, gossiping cleaning lady Hilda Ogden became one of the most beloved stars of Coronation Street. She was not in the original line-up conceived by creator Tony Warren in 1960, but by the 1970s she was an essential part of the show’s memorable cast of strong Northern women who would take no nonsense from men.

At first, the character was something of a stereotype but it was Alexander who saw the potential to make it make more subtle and over time added a vein of vulnerability, pathos and humour that viewers could recognise as genuine. The performance, subtle, funny and touching, made her one of the most popular soap opera characters of all time.

One of the appeals of Hilda’s story was that it was a tragicomedy. Her great desire was to appear respectable – hence the infamous “muriel” on her living room wall complete with three flying ducks, including one wonky one that was forever heading for a crashlanding. But the tragedy was that there never seemed to be any chance of escape for Hilda, thanks partly to her workshy husband Stan, played by Bernard Youens.

Alexander never made the character bitter though. Hilda was a terrible gossip, and had a famously brittle relationship with Annie Walker, the snooty landlady of the Rover’s Return, where Hilda was a cleaner. But the affection between her and Stan was genuine, something reflected in one of Hilda’s most famous scenes when she silently unwraps Stan’s possessions after his death. It was a bravura performance from Alexander that earned her an award from the Royal Television Society.

Alexander had come to Coronation Street after a long career in rep theatre and bit parts on television. Born Jean Hodgkinson in Liverpool, she said it was going to the variety theatres in the city that made her want to become an actress.

In many ways, her upbringing was poorer than Hilda’s. Her dad was an electrician and they lived in a terraced house that had no inside toilet or bathroom. As a teenager, she joined the Playgoers’ Club, an amateur theatre company while working as a library assistant in Liverpool.

It was the promise of a stage management job with the Adelphi Theatre Guild in Macclesfield that eventually made Alexander leave her job with the library and attempt a serious career in the theatre. It led to her debut as a professional actress in 1949 in Somerset Maugham’s Sheppey. She then joined a repertory company in Southport and stayed there for seven years.

She then moved to London and began to win small parts on some of the biggest television shows of the 1960s including the hospital drama Emergency Ward 10 and Z-Cars. Before winning the part of Hilda, she also had a small part on Coronation Street as a landlady.

The audition for Hilda came in 1962, by which point Coronation Street had been running for two years. Alexander said the rapport between her and Youens as Stan was evident from the start, but that they were worried the characters as they were written would have no staying power and viewers would get bored.

"The character was originally written as a rather stereotyped character, as Stan was, you know, big fat man and lazy husband and little nagging wife,” said Alexander.

"After a few weeks we thought this was going to get a bit boring so we started playing against the script - same words but trying to give them a bit more character, rounding them out a bit."

In adding depth to the character, Alexander remembered the women who had worked in munitions factories in Liverpool during the Second World War who would tie their hair up to keep it out of the machinery but have their hair in curlers in case they were asked out for the night.

“And that was Hilda too,” said Alexander. “She always had her hair tied up ready in case. All she had to do was whip the curlers out and give it a flick with the comb. She never did go anywhere that was worth going to but that’s where I got the idea from.”

The formula worked and it wasn’t long before the character of Hilda was among the most popular in the show and central to some of its most memorable moments of the 1970s and 80s. There was always comedy – Hilda’s singing for example and her attempts to be refined – but there was also pathos, such as the time Hilda threw a party for her neighbours and nobody came.

The fans of Coronation Street lapped it up and she became a British institution. “Universities wanted to make her their rector,” the Street producer Bill Podmore once said. “A Welsh rugby team hailed her as their mascot. Even the Falklands fleet urgently called for a picture of their pin-up, complete with curlers, to inspire the troops for battle.” The broadcaster Russell Harty also established a British League for Hilda Ogden – Laurence Olivier was president and John Betjeman was chairman.

Her eventual departure from the show, 23 years after she arrived, was poignant. Alexander had realised that, with Youens’s death, the potential storylines for her character were more limited so she made the decision to go in 1987. The last episode featured a big party in the Rovers with Hilda singing, in that famously high-pitched voice of hers, Wish Me Luck as You Wave me Goodbye. The episode was broadcast on Christmas Day 1987 and was watched by 26 million people.

One of the biggest roles after Coronation Street – indeed, Alexander said it was her favourite – was Auntie Wainwright in Last of the Summer Wine, a part she played off and on for 12 years. She also appeared in Rich Tea and Sympathy, the 1991 sitcom with Patricia Hodge. There were also roles in Heartbeat and Cluedo.

In real life, Alexander was the antithesis of Hilda: sophisticated, quiet, a lover of Beethoven, gardening and crosswords. She was also not keen on the way Coronation Street had developed in recent years, believing that there was too much violence and sex and not enough humour. “Today it’s all sex, doom and gloom and it’s all taken far too seriously,” she said.

Alexander, who died in hospital, never married and is survived by her brother Kenneth Hodgkinson and her nieces Sonia and Valerie.