The whole of the U.K. is in deep mourning today, and anybody in then rest of the civilized world that was deprived from watching Coronation Street the world’s longest running TV soap opera will not understand why. The actress Jean Alexander who played the quintessential British working class legendary heroine Hilda Ogden for 23 years until 1987 has just died aged 90 years old.
Her Hilda was the epitome of all the low-income poorly educated women of that era, and she did domestic cleaning (called a ‘char lady’ in British slang) and any other lowly paid jobs to supplement her lazy husband Stan’s earnings as an occasional window cleaner. She worked for ‘Annie Walker’ the pretentious landlady of the Rovers Return pub in ‘the Street’ (played superbly by the late Doris Speed) and their verbal sparring battles were the highlight of the TV week back in the 1970’s when the defiant Hilda would pepper her banter with delicious malapropisms when she tried to deflate her boss.
We loved Hilda because she was a full-time gossip, or busybody as they were disparagingly called in those days. She was never ever seen without her signature headscarf complete with hair rollers popping out. With her unchecked naïveté and her incessant bravado as she verbally tackled any of her uppity neighbors in this small terraced street in the economically depressed North of England, she became the most unlikely camp gay icon. In fact in 1982 she came fourth behind the Queen Mother, Queen Elizabeth II, and Diana, Princess of Wales in a poll of the most recognizable women in Britain.
When Jean finally ‘retired’ Hilda, she then played Auntie Wainwright the shopkeeper in the long running hit BBC situation comedy series The Last Of the Summer Wine until it ended in 2010.
Every Coronation Street aficionado has their favorite memory of Jean Alexander as Hilda and of the sheer joy she brought us having so much fun in what most of us would have normally considered a miserable existence. Here’s a video of a selection compiled by the British actress Thora Hird as a tribute in 2010.
