Anne Reid

Anne Reid is one of British television's most cherished and durable character actresses, a performer whose career has stretched across more than six decades of small-screen and stage work without ever fading from public affection. Born Anne Patricia Reid on 28 May 1935 in Newcastle upon Tyne, she came from a journalistic family — her father Colin was a Fleet Street reporter — and grew up moving between the north of England and London as his work dictated. After attending the convent school of the Sacred Heart in Hove and then training at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, she emerged into the late 1950s repertory circuit at a moment when British television drama was beginning its first great expansion, and she has been a near-constant presence in the medium ever since.

Reid's earliest screen appearances came in live and as-live productions for the BBC and ITV in the very late 1950s and early 1960s, but her name became nationally familiar in 1961 when she was cast as Valerie Tatlock in the still-young Coronation Street. Valerie married Ken Barlow in 1962 and stayed at the centre of the serial for nearly a decade, becoming one of the programme's defining young wives during its black-and-white heyday. Reid asked to be written out in 1971, and the producers obliged with one of the most notoriously theatrical exits in British soap history: Valerie was electrocuted by a faulty hairdryer on the eve of the Barlows' planned move to Jamaica. The scene has been replayed in clip shows and documentaries ever since, and it gave Reid a kind of folk-memory status with British audiences long before her later, weightier work.

Far from being typecast by the soap, Reid used her departure from Weatherfield to broaden her range across the next twenty years in a steady run of single dramas, sitcoms and serials. She worked repeatedly with Victoria Wood, who became one of her closest collaborators and admirers; their partnership ran from Victoria Wood As Seen on TV in the mid-1980s through to dinnerladies, in which Reid played the perpetually exasperated Jean from 1998 to 2000. She was also a memorable presence in Land of Hope and Glory, The Gathering Seed, In Loving Memory and a long list of guest roles in everything from Bergerac to Midsomer Murders. Her radio work in the same period established a parallel reputation for warm comic timing, most enduringly in Ladies of Letters, the long-running BBC Radio 4 epistolary comedy in which she and Prunella Scales played two suburban widows whose increasingly catty correspondence ran to fourteen series between 1998 and 2009 and was eventually adapted for television by ITV3.

The defining reinvention of Reid's career came in 2003 with Roger Michell's film The Mother, written by Hanif Kureishi. Cast as May, a recently widowed grandmother who embarks on an affair with her daughter's much younger lover (played by Daniel Craig), Reid was given a leading role of unusual frankness and emotional exposure for a woman in her late sixties, and she met it with a performance of startling restraint and erotic candour. The film won her the British Independent Film Award for Best Actress and a BAFTA nomination, and it changed the kind of work she was offered for the rest of her career, marking her out as a serious dramatic lead rather than only a beloved comic supporting player. She has often spoken in interviews about how unexpected the part was at that stage of her life and how grateful she was to Michell and Kureishi for trusting her with it.

In the years after The Mother, Reid moved fluently between film, television and the stage. She appeared as Aunt Martha in Frank Oz's 2007 black comedy Death at a Funeral, holding her own in an ensemble of younger British comic actors, and took supporting roles in films including The Most Fertile Man in Ireland, Hot Fuzz's spiritual cousin Mrs Caldicot's Cabbage War and the period drama The Sense of an Ending. On stage she returned to the Royal Court, the Almeida and the West End in plays by Alan Bennett, Polly Stenham and Rebecca Lenkiewicz among others, and she lent her distinctive, slightly smoky voice to a long line of audiobooks and animations.

Television, however, has remained her natural home, and in 2012 she began the role that has perhaps eclipsed even Valerie Barlow in the public mind. Sally Wainwright's Last Tango in Halifax cast Reid as Celia Dawson, a widowed Yorkshirewoman who reconnects via Facebook with her childhood sweetheart Alan, played by Derek Jacobi, and marries him in their late seventies. The series ran for five series between 2012 and 2020, won the BAFTA for Best Drama Series in 2013, and gave Reid one of the great late-career double acts in British television, alongside Sarah Lancashire and Nicola Walker as their respective daughters. Celia is a tricky, prejudiced, often infuriating creation, and Reid's willingness to let her be unlikeable as well as funny is a large part of what made the show feel so unusually honest about older lives. She returned to popular costume drama soon after as Lady Denham in ITV's adaptation of Jane Austen's unfinished Sanditon, presiding over the Regency seaside town with imperious comic relish across three series from 2019 to 2023, and she has continued to work steadily in projects such as The Sister Boniface Mysteries, Hold the Sunset opposite John Cleese, and audio dramas for Big Finish.

Reid was made an MBE in 2010 and a CBE in 2017 for her services to drama. Widowed in 2003 by the death of her husband, the Coronation Street scriptwriter and producer Peter Eckersley, with whom she had a son, Mark, she has continued to live and work in London, and her professional longevity has come to feel like a kind of quiet rebuke to industry assumptions about older actresses. From a doomed soap-opera hairdryer to a BAFTA-winning lead in her late sixties to a national-treasure double act in her eighties, she has built one of the most varied and quietly radical careers in modern British acting.