June Brown: EastEnders veteran who became a mainstay of British soaps

Her long-term stint as the gossiping, chain-smoking Dot Cotton has ensured her place as a British TV icon

(FilmMagic/Getty)

Just as she experienced tragedy and heartbreak in her own life, June Brown, who has died at the age of 95, was put through the wringer after being cast as Dot Cotton, the gossiping, chain-smoking laundrette assistant who was the local minder-of-morals, in EastEnders four months after the BBC soap opera began, in 1985.

Her 35 years on the show were nothing short of dramatic. Dot was certainly not lucky with her family. When first seen in Albert Square, she had long been deserted by her lazy, pathetic lorry driver husband, Charlie (played by Christopher Hancock), but the devout Christian took pity on him whenever he was down on his luck and returned.

He had no shame in stealing from Dot and she was shocked to discover that he had cheated on her with her own half-sister, Rose, then bigamously married Joan Leggett, but he finally went out of her life for good when he died in a motorway pile-up in 1991.

Even worse was Dot’s criminal son, Nick (John Altman), who also stole from her and once tried to poison his mother to get her bingo winnings, backing out in a rare show of conscience before he could administer the final dose. However, his litany of crimes included burglary, pimping, blackmail and even two murders.

Dot’s own shortcomings ran to racism and shoplifting. She blamed the menopause for her lapse into criminality and was put on hormone replacement therapy by Dr Singh, who also helped to change her views on immigrants. Her anti-gay opinions altered, too, after she became friends with Colin Russell, whom she had originally shunned for his relationship with Barry Clark.

When Dot grew close to Ashley, the son Nick had fathered with his girlfriend Zoe, she agreed to move to Gravesend to live with them all, convinced that Nick was a reformed character. But, four years later, she returned to the Square after her son had been arrested for possessing drugs and his girlfriend and child had fled.

Dot finally married again, on Valentine’s Day 2002, following a proposal on the London Eye by Jim Branning (John Bardon). Although she despaired of his drinking and gambling, she appreciated that she had finally found a loyal husband.

Her own loyalty was put to the test when Ethel Skinner (Gretchen Franklin), her long-time friend who was dying of cancer, begged Dot to relieve her agony by placing morphine pills close enough for her to take a final, lethal dose. It was a dilemma for both character and actor. “The producers knew I would be uncomfortable about the storyline,” said Brown, herself a Christian.

Brown alongside Gretchen Franklin (left) as Ethel Skinner and Dot Cotton (BBC/PA)

“I was worried about the message it would send out and it is against everything I believe in. But, at the same time, we all know people who have been in so much pain that death is a release. My faith is muddled. I believe in God the creator and God the repairer. If you can create, you can repair but, oh dear, am I making any sense at all?”

June Muriel Brown was born in Creeting St Mary, Suffolk, in 1927. She described her father, Henry, who ran an electrical business, as a wealthy entrepreneur who went bankrupt three times while her mother, Louisa (nee Butler), kept money coming into the household as a milliner, allowing her to have a private education at Ipswich High School.

Her early tragedies included the deaths of her two-year-old brother, then her elder sister from meningitis at eight years old, leaving her with the responsibility of looking after her younger sister, Rosemary, while her parents were bound up with financial problems.

Brown’s father had died from alcoholism and her mother from cancer by the time she left school and joined the Wrens as a cinema operator, showing films to servicemen, in 1945, at the end of the Second World War.

Icon to icon: Brown sits with Lady Gaga on ‘The Graham Norton Show’ in 2013 (PA)

After being drafted in to act in the play Call It a Day, on a tour of Southern Command, she enjoyed the experience and left the Wrens in 1948, using her services grant to train at the Old Vic Theatre School, where she made her debut with a walk-on role in Twelfth Night, and subsequently played Foible in The Way of the World (1948), opposite Edith Evans as Lady Wishfort.

She married actor John Garley in 1950 but returned home one day seven years later to find him dying in front of the gas fire, having taken his own life.

“His career was going downhill, he had a disease of the mouth, which caused him pain and which made eating difficult for him, and there’s also a history of mental illness in his family,” said Brown. “I felt so guilty I’d not seen to his problems, but it was too late.”

Shortly afterwards, the actor toured Europe with the Royal Shakespeare Company, before working at various repertory theatres. In Birmingham, while playing Lady Macbeth to Albert Finney’s Macbeth, she married another actor, Robert Arnold, in 1958, and, just a month after giving birth to their first child, Louise, was back on stage.

Although she had another five children, further tragedy struck when one of them, whom she named Chloë, died shortly after a premature birth, weighing just 1lb. (She subsequently named another of her children Chloë.)

Smoking a cigarette while filming EastEnders in 1997 (PA)

While Arnold was enjoying fame as PC Reginald Swain in the popular police series Dixon of Dock Green, Brown kept working as a character actor on screen, deciding that working on stages around the country was not compatible with bringing up children.

Having already made her cinema debut, as an uncredited announcer, in the fashion-industry drama It Started in Paradise (1952), she had small roles in films such as Straw Dogs (1971), Sitting Target (as Oliver Reed’s neighbour in the 1972 crime thriller) and Murder by Decree (starring Christopher Plummer and James Mason as Sherlock Holmes and Dr Watson investigating the Jack the Ripper murders).

Brown’s first television appearance was as Chica, a native, in The Rough and Ready Lot (1959), an adaptation of Alun Owen’s play about 19th-century Irish, Welsh and English guerrillas fighting for the independence of South American Indians.

Brown and John Bardon in their roles as Dot and Jim Branning (BBC/PA)

Alongside many subsequent bit-parts on television, she appeared in several episodes of Coronation Street between 1970 and 1971 as the mother of Tony Parsons, who was persuaded by Ena Sharples to allow her talented, organ-playing son to apply for a place at music college. She also played Lady Eleanor, who concocts a sleeping potion in an attempt to thwart one of the Time Lord’s enemies, in the Doctor Who story “The Time Warrior” (set in the Middle Ages).

However, by the time she was cast as Dot Cotton in EastEnders in 1985, Brown and her husband were working less frequently and living on the poverty line. “I felt my whole life had closed in,” she said.

“I’d been offered no work, was trapped in a hole and couldn’t see my way out. I earned just £3,000 a year, not enough to support my husband, who was always in and out of work all the time, and our five teenage kids. There was just no hope for the future – it was a choice between money for the electricity bill or saving the family from starvation.”

‘It is a tribute to Brown’s ability that she manages to rinse off Dot Cotton as easily as if she were a shampoo bubble under a power shower’ (BBC/PA)

Brown joined the soap for Episode 40, in July 1985, although Dot Cotton already existed in Albert Square and had been mentioned on screen. But, after 18 years in the role, Brown began to feel that the character had been toned down and left, looking for new challenges.

She played Mrs Jones, the head of the local community group who is concerned about new neighbours moving into a suburban house after a life on the high seas in children’s sitcom Pirates (1994), a spinster in Bed (a surreal drama about seven people living in the same bed, written by Jim Cartwright, 1995), and Mrs Jilkes in the three-part wartime comedy-drama Ain’t Misbehavin’ (starring Robson Green and Jerome Flynn as musicians in a show band, 1997).

Brown showed a new string to her bow by directing two stage productions, Double D at the 1993 Edinburgh Festival, and Malcolm Needs’s play Pin Money (Jermyn Street Theatre, 1996), in which she also starred.

Although she was persuaded to return to EastEnders in 1997, the actor took occasional breaks to appear in the courtroom drama Verdict (1998) and comedy-drama Margery and Gladys. She also received plaudits for her performance as Nannie Slagg in a BBC adaptation of Mervyn Peake’s gothic novel Gormenghast (2000), one critic noting: “It is a tribute to Brown’s ability that she manages to rinse off Dot Cotton as easily as if she were a shampoo bubble under a power shower.”

Brown’s second husband died in 2003. She is survived by five children and six grandchildren.

In 2003, Brown starred in the EastEnders spin-off Dot’s Story, following her soap character on a nostalgic trip to Wales, where she had been evacuated as a child during the Second World War. The actor succeeded in making her screen alter ego such an icon that the Dot Cotton Club, a monthly Cambridge LGBTQ club night, was named after her. In 2013, Brown’s autobiography, Before the Year Dot, was published.

She was made an MBE In 2008 and an OBE in 2021.

Brown finally put out Dot Cotton’s cigarette in February 2020 at the age of 93, having left an indelible mark on British soap opera.

June Brown, actor, born 16 February 1927, died 3 April 2022