June Brown

Desert Island Discs

BBC

Society & Culture, Music Commentary, Music, Personal Journals

4.4 • 13.7K Ratings

🗓️ 12 February 2017

⏱️ 38 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

June Brown is best known today for her role as the long-suffering chain-smoking Dot Cotton (now Dot Branning) in the BBC TV soap EastEnders. She arrived on a three month contract in 1985 and is still in the show. She was nominated for a BAFTA in 2008. She celebrates her 90th birthday in February 2017 and has no intention of retiring as acting "keeps her alive". June was born in Suffolk and brought up in a music-loving family. Towards the end of World War Two, she joined up, choosing the WRNS where she worked as a cinema operator showing training films and newsreels to the sailors. She did some acting during that time and after a brief and unsuccessful job in an office, she was one of very few chosen to receive a classical training at the Old Vic Theatre School. From there she joined the Old Vic Theatre Company where she worked with such greats as Edith Evans, Laurence Oliver and Albert Finney. Her roles included Lady Macbeth and Ibsen's Hedda Gabler. She had five children in relatively quick succession and continued acting on TV and the London stage, often putting her youngest in a pram and going in the guard's van on the train to the theatre. Throughout her time on EastEnders she has occasionally ventured away to direct or take part in other television series. In 2009 she stripped down to nothing as Jessie in the stage production Calendar Girls. She was 82. She was awarded an MBE for services to drama and charity in 2008. Producer: Sarah Taylor.

Transcript

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0:00.0	This is the BBC.
0:03.6	Hello, I'm Kirstie Young.
0:05.4	Thank you for downloading this podcast of Desert Island Discs from BBC Radio 4.
0:09.9	For rights reasons, the music choices are shorter than in the Radio broadcast.
0:14.4	For more information about the programme, please visit bbc.co.uk-radio4.
0:30.4	My castaway this week is the actress, June Brown.
0:44.0	It was on EastEnders over 30 years ago that Dot Cotton trust up in an overall with a fag in hand,
0:50.8	entered the national consciousness as Wolford's tragicomic lady of the Laundret.
0:56.0	The storylines she's weathered throughout the decades are as nothing compared to the
1:00.4	vicissitudes and triumphs of the actress's own life. A father who made and lost a small fortune,
1:06.9	a sister her best friend who died in childhood, and yet amid all this she was a leading lady of
1:13.6	stage classics, a mother of five children, and of course an award-winning TV actress now about to
1:19.6	turn 90 and still working. She says, I've never entertained the idea of retiring because I've
1:26.2	never regarded myself as having a proper job. Anyway, retirement can be the death of you,
1:31.4	and so, June Brown, we welcome you to our Desert Island. You have made
1:36.5	dots, I think it's fair to say, into one of the great iconic TV soap characters.
1:42.0	You've been playing her for a long time. You're sort of frowning as I say iconic there,
1:46.1	but I'm afraid it's true. Do you still enjoy playing the character?
1:50.0	Making faces now, I can't be, I'm just an actress, you know, I've been very fortunate and I'm well
1:56.4	known, I don't talk about myself as anything more than well known, and I'm lucky.
2:01.9	I know it is very indelicate to mention a lady's age, but it is worth letting listeners know that
2:06.6	you're about to celebrate your 90th birthday. It's notoriously hard work being on a soap.
	...

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