June Brown, who has died at the age of 95, won her place in British hearts playing the chain-smoking washerwoman Dot Cotton in EastEnders. It was a part she would play for more than 30 years, well past her 90th birthday.
In person, Brown was a riot. One Guardian writer described her as 'Kenneth Williams trapped in the body of Cilla Black'. But like her on-screen persona, her private life was touched by extremes of emotion – with great happiness, romantic love affairs, terrible heartache and family tragedy.
June Muriel Brown was born in Needham Market, Suffolk in 1927. Her father, Harry, was a wealthy businessman who went bust investing money in German banks before World War Two. Her mother, Louisa, was a milliner – who June was convinced loved her far less than her four other siblings. Brown would describe herself as a 'mongrel'. Her grandfather was from Scotland, her mother from Italian stock.
Her younger brother, John, died of pneumonia in 1932 when he was just 15 days old. Two years later, June lost her elder sister to meningitis. The loss of eight-year-old Marise affected her deeply. It 'shaped the way I behaved for a long time', she wrote in her autobiography, Before The Year Dot.
Brown served in the Women's Royal Naval Service at the end of the war, based in Scotland, where she discovered the joys of acting. She won a place at London's Old Vic Theatre School where she met and married her first husband, actor John Garley. He suffered from depression and took his own life in 1957. In 1958, she married actor Robert Arnold, with whom she had six children in seven years, although her second daughter Chloe died after just 16 days. They were together for 45 years until his death in 2003.
When Dot Cotton arrived in Albert Square in 1985, June Brown was in her late fifties. She was booked for three months but stayed for more than a quarter of a century. Dot's lot was largely an unhappy one – a hypochondriac, tragic-comic character, gossiping, chain-smoking and always guided by the scriptures.
