Amanda Barrie, the coronation street icon and Bad Girls icon, talks to Jessica Boulton about turning 90, having plastic surgery, writing a spicy memoir, and having TWO life-changing operations in just six months.
It was just three years after VE-Day when 13-year-old northerner Shirley Broadbent first stood on the steps outside London’s Theatre Royal Drury Lane. In the tradition of the great Victorian actors before her, she said a prayer – not for fame, money, marriage, or even a home that was better than her current Soho boarding house. She had just one wish: to act. Anywhere and anyhow she could.
It was in that same theatre that she later sneaked into an audition, underage, and won her first major pantomime role. It was also there that she married the love of her life. Now, next week, after a phenomenal career, Amanda Barrie will once again return to to theatre’s Grand Salon – this time to celebrate her 90th birthday. A lot has changed in eight decades – including her name. But the Coronation Street and Bad Girls legend isn’t dreading the milestone – she’s simply relieved she’s still here.
Because today, she reveals that she has had two life-changing operations in the last six months, one to replace a heart valve with pig tissue and the other to replace her hip.
Had she been awake and had an allergy to general anesthesia not prevented her from hearing every bone-cracking sound the surgeon made, the second should have been straightforward.
“So far this year, I’ve appeared in two theatres,” Amanda smiles. “Both operating theatres. But I did have two marvellous leading men, to whom I was happy to relinquish top billing! With the hip, I could only have an epidural, so I couldn’t feel anything, but I could hear it. The surgeon was sawing and hammering away on the bone. It was like he was trying to dig another Channel Tunnel!”
As for the heart…. “They used a new non-invasive technique going up through the groin,” she explains. “The only weird part came when I was lying there – scared, wondering if the surgeon had had a good night’s sleep – and someone said: ‘What would you like us to do with your knickers?’ I’m on the table waiting for a heart operation, what exactly were my options? So I told them: ‘Put them on eBay!’”
Such talk would probably have made Corrie’s iconic Alma Sedgewick/Baldwin/Halliwell blush. But Amanda is approaching her health woes and upcoming birthday with the same dry trademark wit that she’s previously displayed on everything from Celebrity Big Brother to Hell’s Kitchen and The Real Marigold Hotel.
She only occasionally requires a crutch because she is already back walking. And not always for the reason you might believe. “I was out with it yesterday and people were so nice”, she laughs. They opened doors, smiled, and rushed to help me as I just waved it a little. I might keep it longer, perhaps.
She’s also sworn off roast pork, “out of respect” to her new heart valve. She sneers, “I can’t resist a bacon sandwich, though.” However, I do put my hand on my heart and apologize whenever I consume one. I’m sorry if it’s one of your cousins! ‘ I’ll say that.
It’s the thought that counts. And looking as fabulous as she does at 89, Amanda – born in Greater Manchester’s Ashton-Under-Lyne in 1935 – is definitely doing something right. She barely looks 70 yet has never even considered plastic surgery. “I once had an op on a tear duct for medical reasons and there was a complication,” Amanda explains. “It wouldn’t stop bleeding. I needed emergency treatment. The doctors told me afterwards that it was also an op available at cosmetic clinics. Had I been at one, they wouldn’t have had the equipment to save me. I would have been dead. So after that….”
Instead she has a different secret to ageing gracefully. She says, “It’s the fringe.” “And sunglasses.”
Amanda hits her milestone next Sunday, September 14, three days after another big day: the launch of her autobiography Amanda Barrie: I’m Still Here.
Her life has never not been eventful: expelled twice by 13, a cabaret showgirl in the midst of a gangster war at 16 (alongside Barbara Windsor), ending up naked on the set of Carry on Cleo (thanks to a grumpy Kenneth Williams) in her 20s, and hedonistic summers in Cannes in the Swinging 60s, ‘dealing’ “Purple Heart” happy pills to her pals (and the occasional sneaky laxatives to those who crossed her). Even before her two decades as Mike Baldwin’s on-off flame on Corrie and Stephanie Beacham’s partner-in-crime on Bad Girls, Amanda had lived more than a few lifetimes.
She says, “I don’t feel 90.” “Plus I’ve got to get there first. There are still more days to go. If I keel over and don’t make it, I’ll be very upset!” As she poses for photos against the theatre’s grand fireplace, she adds: “On the upside, at least we’re sorted for the obituary pictures now”!
Amanda’s relationship with death was more than just sporadic. A shockwave of a blast caused a tin of her father’s black market peas to fall on her head as a child during a wartime bombing raid, which gave her a limited chance of escaping. She’s also had at least four close shaves on set.
She says, “I’ve had this extraordinary sense of mortality sitting on my shoulders since I was five years old.” It’s actually better now that I’m older and my friends also have it, they say. One has only just realised she’s going to die one day. She anticipated a solution by now”!
It’s love, Amanda’s true source of joy, after all. Her closest friends always knew she was ahead of her time – attracted to the person, not the gender. From the 1960s until the Millennium, she and actor Robin Hunter were engaged in what might now be referred to as a throuple.
It was not until 2003 that Amanda made the decision to come out publicly – having fallen for former Mirror journalist-turned-bestselling crime writer Hilary Bonner, now 76, after working together on a Corrie story. Next Friday, they’ll be celebrating 11 years of marriage after tying the knot in the same Grand Salon where Amanda will be marking her birthday with a deluxe Champagne afternoon tea party.
The couple, who live between Covent Garden and Somerset, are amazed how much public attitudes have changed over the years. For Amanda’s adamant she could never have come out before Alma’s death on Corrie in 2001. “It wouldn’t have been the bosses who caused a problem so much as some of the other cast,” she reveals. ”My close friends like Helen Worth all knew the truth. But you heard other people say certain things….Not naming names.
“Now there are so many LGBTQI characters on the show I often joke they should rename it Canal Street! [after Manchester’s gay bar district]. What happened after I left? It’s not contagious, you know!”
Amanda is well aware she’s pushing the boundaries in these dangerous times of cancel culture. After fumbling what she was trying to say about Trans rights during her 2018 Celebrity Big Brother stint she found herself being heinously trolled.
She believes that a better understanding of the discrimination faced by the earlier generations would help. She was 33 by the time male homosexuality was decriminalised in 1967″. The only reason women weren’t prohibited was that Queen Victoria, who passed the law, was too preoccupied with John Brown, the Scottish man, to think about us, “Amanda quips.” He was always wearing a skirt, though!
She continues, “I lived in a time when people made you feel humiliated and shamed like you had something more than leprosy.” Suicide was committed by people.
Although, in Amanda’s circles there’s something far more shocking and outrageous about Hilary than her gender. She yelled “gasp!” a “Red Top journalist” People were shocked because for years I was terrified of interviews, “Amanda laughs.
Now, however, Hilary is the only person Amanda could trust to help write her life story. So after all the reminiscing it involved, is there anything Amanda wishes she could now tell 13-year-old Shirley on the theatre steps?
” I could tell myself today, the same thing I could tell myself when I was 13, “she admits”. To refrain from thinking and simply act. Every job I do still have a state before me. I have done all my life. I constantly feel like I can’t do it. I’m not good, either. If only one could cut out all that wasted time. “
To the outsider, it’s unfathomable. Amanda herself struggles to remember why she even hated her looks in her Carry On Cleo days. But she’s not one to look backwards for too long. Instead she’s focusing on what’s next: The Audience With Coronation Street tour later this month, where she’ll be sharing stories about life as Alma. Other than that, she has just one ambition left….“To carry on breathing,” she smiles. As ambitions go, it’s probably the best.
Amanda Barrie: I’m Still Here (published by Mirror Books, £22) is on sale on Thursday in all good bookshops. Preorder on Amazon here.
Amanda will be appearing on two dates of the An Audience With Coronation Street tour, beginning September 14.
Source: Mirror
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