Hilda Ogden was Weatherfield's answer to Carmen Miranda. While Miranda wore fruit in her hair, Hilda favoured curlers and headscarf, as if her hairdo were permanently in preparation for a glamorous invitation that never came. And when she warbled in a reedy, affected soprano (usually as she dusted the Rovers Return under the landlady Annie Walker's patrician eye), those on the receiving end winced. Yet, against the odds, Hilda, conceived by Coronation Street's writers in 1964 as a nagging wife and gossiping char, became much more than that and found a place in the hearts of millions of the enduring soap's fans.
Jean Alexander, who played Hilda for 23 years, was always queasy about the role that made her a household name. When Alexander, who has died aged 90, was being considered for the part, she told her agent she worried that "the end result might be a blight on my career". And in her 1989 autobiography The Other Side of the Street, she distanced herself from her most famous role, saying of Hilda: "She was a spunky little soul, a fighter, like one of those lead-bottomed dolls that returns upright when it is knocked down. There was a lot in her that I admire but she ceased to exist the moment I took out my curlers, folded my pinny, rearranged my hair and stepped into the real world at the end of each recording. There was no nonsense about the character taking me over. I would have hated it if Hilda had lived in my house!"
Hilda Ogden was born during Granada TV’s 1964 night of the long knives. Eager for ratings and worried that the four-year-old soap had become too cosy, the show’s new producer, Tim Aspinall, purged several actors including Frank Pemberton, Doreen Keogh and Ivan Beavis. The character Martha Longhurst, who had been the gossipy foil of Minnie Caldwell and Ena Sharples, had a heart attack and collapsed on a table in the Rovers snug.
In came the bracing new Ogden family. Stan was played by a former leading man and Granada continuity announcer Bernard Youens and his wife Hilda by Alexander, who was then 38 and whose acting career until that breakthrough had consisted of character parts in theatres at Southport and York, and minor TV roles. Hilda had an Alpine mural on the living room wall which she called a “muriel” and three plaster ducks rising up it – a vista Stan later ruined by letting his bath overflow.
But Hilda and Stan confounded that blueprint. Viewers loved them for their daily battles against their plight in the seemingly cursed 13 Coronation Street – she destined to live on her wits, he dodging any task that didn’t send him in the direction of a pint. They were like us, or like what we feared becoming.
As for Youens and Alexander, they established an off-screen rapport perhaps more straightforwardly fond than the relationship they acted out on screen. She called him Bunny and the two actors often rehearsed their lines over convivial games of Scrabble.
In 1979, the British League for Hilda Ogden was founded: its honorary life president was Sir John Betjeman, and Russell Harty, Willis Hall and Michael Parkinson were on the committee. They were proud to wear the BLHO’s lapel badge featuring Hilda in curlers.
In 1984, Youens died and so, after a bizarre interval, Stan was written out, dying in his sleep upstairs at no 13 that November. Nothing became Hilda so much as the manner of her grieving Stan’s passing. Alone in that muriel-dominated living room, she took her husband’s specs from their case and unfolded and folded them one last time. Alexander’s performance was honoured with a Royal Television Society best performance award. “I did not bring any of my real sorrow to the screen,” said Alexander. “After, all Bunny had died some months earlier.”
Alexander couldn't carry on in Coronation Street for much longer after that. Hilda holed up with her cat, Rommel, until, on Christmas Day 1987, she was invited to move to the country with the widowed Dr Lowther and keep house for him. Her departure was front page news. "TA-RA CHUCK!" was the News of the World's headline. Hilda was 63 at the time, Alexander only 61, and looking for new challenges.
She was born in Toxteth, Liverpool, the second child of Archie, an electrician, and Nell, who lived in a terraced house very similar to Hilda and Stan’s (except it didn’t have a bathroom or indoor lavatory). Jean got the acting bug early after staying at a guesthouse in Barrow-in-Furness where her dad was working at the shipyard. In the guest-house backyard, 12 dancing girls practised their routines. Jean was captivated.
As a teenager, she spent spare time at the Playgoers’ Club, an amateur theatre troupe where she became adept at stage management, set building and prompting. She also sought to obliterate her native accent with five-shilling weekly elocution lessons. They didn’t quite work: in later life, she reported, someone would always ask: “What did you say, scouse?”
In 1949, after five years working for Liverpool's library service, she was hired to act at £5 a week by the Macclesfield-based Adelphi Theatre Guild. She made her professional debut in Somerset Maugham's Sheppey as Florrie. It was not a success and she received her first and worst review.
During the 1950s she worked in theatre in Southport and York. She took relatively minor roles, such as the front end of a pantomime horse and the bargewoman in Eugene O'Neill's Anna Christie. At the end of the decade she headed to London where in 1960 she made her TV debut in Deadline Midnight. A string of minor TV roles followed, including in 1962 a small part in Coronation Street as a kidnapper's landlady.
The year after leaving Coronation Street for good, Alexander made a guest appearance in the BBC's long-running sitcom, Last of the Summer Wine. She also had minor roles in films: she was Christine Keeler's mother in Scandal, the 1989 film about the Profumo affair, and voiced Mrs Santa in Hooves of Fire, the 1999 Robbie the Reindeer film.
Alexander successfully kept any hint of a personal life out of the papers. She wrote: “I wanted to be an actress from a very early age and I dedicated myself to achieving that ambition. Marriage was never part of that long-term plan – After all, there are millions of women in the country who have preferred a career to a marriage. I am just one of them.”
She is survived by a brother, Kenneth Hodgkinson, and nieces Sonia Hearld and Valerie Thewlis.