EE: June Brown gets BAFTA nomination

[faceless]

Ohh I say...

[Skylace]

Great news indeed. Well deserving. I hope she wins. I have to say she is my favorite actress on the show by far.

[eefanincan]

Good for June! She's a great actress and I love the work she's done on EE.... this would be a well deserved award.

[SpursFan1902]

Oh I say...it's about time! I hope I look as good as she does at 82.

[faceless]

EastEnders' legend June Brown on her Bafta nod
17/04/2009
mirror.co.uk

It’s the phone call most actors long to receive. But god help whoever disturbs June Brown’s beauty sleep with the trifling news of a Bafta nomination. The 82-year-old – known to millions of EastEnders fans as chain-smoking hypochondriac Dot Cotton – says: “I suppose I do feel proud, but how did I hear I was nominated? Diederick Santer, our guv’nor, rang me up quite early in the morning, so I wasn’t best pleased cos he woke me up. But it was nice of him. The cast have been lovely. Everyone is almost more pleased than I am cos I’m a grumpy old thing really.”

June has been around showbusiness for too long to get carried away with her nomination for Best TV Actress. She said: “I don’t believe anything is going to happen until it does, until you see your name on a paper or it actually happens and you have something in your hand. So I don’t get too excited. I have got quite a few awards already in the garage, one of them nearly flattened me. It fell off the cupboard and made a quarter-of-an-inch dent in the floor. So we are quite wary of awards, because they are heavy things.”

For 24 years June has been a regular fixture in living rooms up and down the country. Her character is so well known she even has a condition named after her. The “Dot Cotton Syndrome” is used among health professionals to describe the nation’s elderly population who smoke heavily. However, the similarities between God-fearing Dot and June do not end when the cameras stop rolling. June likes her cigarettes so much she has found a way around the smoking bans in pubs and restaurants.

When we meet at a posh London hotel, she shows off her new electric cigarettes. At £40 each, they give her a nicotine hit but release water vapour instead of smoke so she can use them indoors. “You are allowed to smoke them in hotels and places like that,” June says, brandishing one and taking a puff. “That is water vapour coming out. There is no ash, you can put it on a table and it doesn’t burn. I have got a normal-looking one and a black one with a blue light on the end that comes on when you inhale. I have even got a leaflet to say that it is legal to smoke it inside. I normally carry it around with me, but today my bag was a bit small.”

With cigarettes in hand and slipping on sunglasses that she proudly tells me she has had for 30 years, June reluctantly gets down to the business of talking about her Bafta nomination. The Suffolk-born actress is the first soap star to receive the honour since Jean Alexander in 1989 for her portrayal of Coronation Street legend Hilda Ogden. And although June herself doesn’t seem terribly bothered, lots of people are getting excited on her behalf. Soap fans everywhere hope she will triumph.

June was nominated for an episode she carried single-handedly in January. It was a TV first and critics were united in their praise for her moving monologue into a tape recorder for TV husband Jim Branning. She revealed that, despite their love, she could not care for him at home after he had a stroke. The Mirror’s Jim Shelley said it was “as powerful and poignant a piece of drama as you will see” and tipped it to win prizes. The fact that actor John Bardon, 69, had actually suffered a stroke in real life made it even more poignant.

June says: “The Bafta nomination is all down to that single episode. Tony Jordan wanted to write an episode for a character all on their own and he chose mine. One of the other actors, I can’t tell you who, said ‘well, I think she might manage 15 minutes but not half an hour’. I did think that myself because I thought, ‘what are they going to say?’ And then, rather unfortunately, dear John Bardon had his stroke and that was the peg they hung it on. Dot has such a history so there is a lot you can call upon. Whereas if you had not been in it so long, you hadn’t been a widow or had a naughty son or been a sad little girl or evacuated. You see, so much has happened I could write it myself. And learning the lines was very easy because it flowed and was so well written. It was beautiful.”

June is close friends with Bardon and still tries to visit him once a week when she passes on all the gossip from the other actors in Albert Square. Sounding excited at the prospect of his return, she says: “John is coming back in June and he is improving all the time. You just keep all your fingers crossed that Jim will be back. He won’t be grumpy and he will talk as much as he can. He does say things without thinking. It is when he thinks about it there is a problem. It is a bit like me playing tennis. If I think about playing a shot, I hit the net or sky it. But if I don’t think about it I might do a passable shot. It is a bit like that with his speech.

"He can walk and make tea and coffee and play dominoes and paint with his left hand, cos he was a painter, but it must be terrible. He could play golf and it must be terrible not to use that right hand.”

Widower June first took up the role of Dot Cotton in July 1985 working as a launderette assistant along with Pauline Fowler, played by Wendy Richard, who died this year. June’s only break started in 1993 when she took four years off. Only Adam Woodyatt, who plays Ian Beale, and Pat Butcher actress Pam St Clement can boast more years drinking in the Queen Vic. Last year June was awarded an MBE for services to drama.

So how much longer will Dot be living at 25 Albert Square? “It all depends what happens to her,” June says. “You go on as long as you can. As long as I can put a few words together and speak, then I’ll keep going.”

----------

I didn't realise she's 82 - that's some going for an old codger!

[Aja]

bless her

[11antoniacourt]

[SpursFan1902]

I love it when the right person gets the nod and hard work is recognized.

[Skylace]

I got a small handwritten note from her in May of last year. I had written to her about her one woman episode. I was very happy and have carefully saved it. Her note just showed that the praise we all give her is justly deserved.

[11antoniacourt]

I toyed with sending her a note about that episode, but then I realized I'd have to find something to write on, and something to write with, and then I'd have to look up the address, and then I'd have to go to the post office and deal with postal employees. So I took a nap instead.

[Skylace]

[faceless]

naps FTW!

[faceless]

'And I haven't been drinking! Think what I'd say if I'd had a glass of wine'
Decca Aitkenhead meets June Brown
guardian.co.uk
Monday 20 April 2009

June Brown totters into the room at Elstree studios looking like an Upper East Side widow - all collarbones and sparkly jewels beneath a glossy blow-dry. She sinks into an armchair, throws her head back and lets out a world-weary sigh. "Oh!" she groans. "And now we've got to do this interview." She laughs a low, baleful growl of ironic despair. "You've always got to have something to say, haven't you? For an interview. Something to talk about. But I've got nothing to say, you know."

For someone with nothing to say, Brown can certainly talk. Her face has been familiar to us for almost quarter of a century as Dot Cotton of Albert Square - EastEnders' pinched and parochial working-class washerwoman, an unlovely old Cockney gossip. In real life, however, she turns out to be Kenneth Williams trapped in the body of Cilla Black.

At 82, the actor has the vintage camp of a classical drag queen - deadpan, long suffering, dripping in irony. Even the most banal of remarks is dressed in ridicule for comic effect, with raised eyebrows and a conspiratorial sideways glance, uttered with the utmost seriousness to convey the exact opposite. Not one but two PR women have been assigned to the interview, and a third has been sending me perky emails: "June also does a lot of charity work, which she will tell you about. Also EastEnders has its 25th anniversary in February next year - she may bring this up!" Fat chance of that. Instead, long misanthropic riffs are delivered with Eeyorish melancholy, followed by gusts of gravelly laughter, as mocking of herself as of the madness of the world.

Everything is disowned and disclaimed, with an expression of elegant disdain and vague distraction, as if nothing could possibly have anything to do with her. Thespians traditionally fall into two categories - gushing luvvies and gloomy ironists - and Brown belongs firmly among the latter, enjoying the role of someone too unimpressionable to be governable. "Oh, she'll be horrified I said that," she likes to mutter, nodding towards a PR woman, after even the most innocuous remark. The PRs smile on brightly, if a little tightly - "She's a character!" - and they're not wrong. "I've already been told not to talk about this, and not to talk about that. I mean, really," Brown sighs weakly, "what's the point?"

The point, of course, is Brown's nomination for a Bafta for best actress - the first soap star to be nominated in more than 20 years. Not since Jean Alexander was shortlisted for her portrayal of Hilda Ogden in Coronation Street has there been such recognition. Brown earned hers with an episode of EastEnders devoted entirely to Dot Cotton - a mournful half-hour monologue, delivered in the style of Alan Bennett's Talking Head, with an understated economy that transcended the cartoonish confines of most soap opera. If she wins on Sunday, she will be the first soap actor ever to take home the award.

"Oh, the Bafta? Well, you see, I don't like talking about things that haven't happened. I suppose the nomination's lovely, and I wish I was the sort of person who's full of joy, but I'm not." She laughs glumly. "I just can't get enthusiastic about things any more. I don't know why. I think it's age." She starts to laugh again, and breaks into a deep, throaty cough. "Sorry, I went out one day, and it was wet and nasty, and this cough is a result. It's nothing to do with that" - she points to the cigarettes on the table - "because I do that all the time, and I don't have this cough all the time.

"Any old road, as they say in Suffolk - oh dear, I mustn't move my face, I'll crack my makeup. I mustn't laugh, just do a film-star smile, and then your face doesn't move. Don't like makeup. I don't use it much unless I go out - I think it makes you look older. But anyway, where we were up to? Any old road, I'd said - then, oh yes, everybody said when I did that one-hander thing, they said, 'Oh you'll get the awards for that. This one woman wrote and said if I didn't get an award she'd make me one herself. Well, that's very sweet of you, dear." She pauses for another rasp of laughter. "Well, I didn't get any award for it at all [until the Bafta nomination]. I think they'd all forgotten, it was so long ago. Anyway, I'm not young and beautiful, and the young girls, they vote on the internet, don't they? For the young girls they'd like to be, or the young boys they'd like to go out with, not for some old granny. So it was rather nice that I finally did get a nomination."

She breaks into another cough, reaches for a cigarette and lights up. "Don't tell anybody. You see, I left my phoney cigarettes in my dressing room." The PRs shoot each other worried looks and one dispatches the other to fetch Brown's battery-operated fake cigarettes from the dressing room, "so we don't get into trouble".

"Oh, I'd go, but I can't be bothered. You see, I'm in a funny mood. It's to do with all sorts of things, like the Bafta nomination, which is a bit of responsibility." Brown sighs theatrically. "And then there's clothes, dear. And then you can't smoke anywhere. My life is just - logistics - fitting everything in."

She falls silent long enough for me to get a question in, so I ask why the Bafta feels like a responsibility. "Well, because everybody else is thrilled about it here. Somebody said to me the other day, all of 'soap' is thrilled about it." She widens her eyes and laughs her dirty, mocking laugh again. "I suppose it's because they think, 'Oh, we're recognised as being serious actors.'" Does it feel like that to her? "Well, I always have been a serious actor." She checks herself. "You see, it's difficult. If I win it, I might have said things to you now that I wanted to use in my speech, and that would be very galling. So I can't be too interesting for you, just in case." She laughs and coughs again. "I don't even want to go to the Baftas, but I don't know if that's denial, as they say these days. 'Oh, shut up, grow up, put your clothes on and go,' that's what they'd have said in my day. And now they say, 'Are you in denial?'" She rolls her eyes and takes another drag.

"I find the whole of society - I think that's what depresses me more than anything else - our blame culture, our, 'I'll sue you if you say this, you can't say that', all of this. Everybody's allowed to be so weak, I suppose that's the trouble, that's what it's all about, why I can't be enthusiastic. I can't explain it to you - well, I could I explain to you, but I can't be bothered."

The PR returns with the electronic cigarettes, as Brown is lighting up her second real one. "Can't you smoke your electric ones?" "Oh, darling, you're not here, go outside, don't take any notice." "If upstairs come down they'll shoot me." "You'll not be shot, they'll shoot me. Just tell them it's me." Puffing away, she murmurs, "I tell everybody to say that, just blame me."

"I find," she continues wearily, "the whole of this society - the rules and regulations - and there are so many now! All those cameras, we are so watched as a society, I really do feel poor old George Orwell should have made it a bit later, but it really is a Big Brother society. And people sneak on each other, they tell tales, and I was taught that was a dreadful thing to do when I was at school, to sneak." She wrinkles her nose, then tells herself off for messing up her makeup again.

"What this article's going to be like, dear, I dread to think. I shan't be sleeping for days - and then I won't read it."

I suspect Brown's dissident irreverence is her way of making it known that she is in fact a very serious person - far too serious to be swayed by the vagaries of life. She was born in Suffolk, the second of five children, to a wealthy businessman who lost most of his money in the war, and her childhood was scarred by the death of two siblings. She began acting while serving with the Wrens, and studied at the Old Vic, where she met her first husband, a brilliant but depressive actor called John Garley. After seven years of marriage she came home one day to find he had gassed himself. She was remarried a year later, to another actor, Robert Arnold, and had six children, one of whom died in infancy. The couple were together for 45 years, until Arnold died in 2003 of Lewy body dementia.

For Brown, who spent years with the Royal Shakespeare Company before joining EastEnders, acting is clearly high art, and the stage its highest form. When she was offered the part of Dot Cotton, it was initially for just three months, and she was wary of joining a soap. She'd only seen the show once, "and there was an argument going on, and I thought, 'Oh, I don't want to watch all that,' so I switched it off. I didn't watch it again until I was asked to be in it."

For a while she got hooked on it, but no longer watches, and since the soap expanded to four shows a week she says she doesn't even know what's going on in the various storylines. In 1993 she left the soap, complaining that her character had become dreary, "living off her old reputation", but returned in 1997, and earns a reported £400,000 a year.

I ask if cast members are competitive about storylines, and she replies, rather unconvincingly, "I don't think so." She pauses for a beat. "Well, some people get upset when they don't have storylines, but you can't have one all the time. Well," she adds under her breath, "some people do, but we won't say anything about that," and she breaks into another cough, which turns into a waspish laugh.

Only Adam Wyatt - Ian Beale - has served longer on the show, and I imagine that must make her head girl to newcomers. "Oh no," she deadpans. "They come in and look at you all big-eyed, and then they treat you like chip paper once they've got the storylines and you haven't. They think, 'Oh, there's old bit part there.'" She snorts, then laughs. "And I haven't been drinking! Think what I'd say if I'd had a glass of wine."

She lights up another cigarette, and moments later the door opens and in walks the inevitable woman from "upstairs". "June," she says patiently, "you look absolutely beautiful, but you're going to cause a complete and utter catastrophe. Can't you smoke your electric ones?" Brown concedes reluctant defeat, stubs it out, and begins puffing away obediently on her fake cigarette. The pair natter away for a few minutes, and the funeral of a fellow cast member, the late Wendy Richard, comes up.

"Did I tell you, I felt Wendy there? Most weird. I was chatting away to her during the funeral, and -" Brown glances at me and breaks off. "You'd better keep quiet about this, dear, or I'll get more of those letters asking me to heal them."

Brown is often described in the press as a healer, which bothers her because she gets inundated with requests. She does believe in it, though; one of her children was born with paralysis, and Brown claims she was cured after she found a Christian healer to pray for her. When I ask why on earth she used to live in Croydon - she's now moved to leafy Chipstead - she says, "I don't know, story of my life, dear, it's all to do with this" - and points to a line on her palm. "That means your life is governed by chance."

I had read that Brown's favourite TV programmes were Newsnight and Panorama, which is beginning to seem improbable, but she confirms that they are - and adds that she is "quite political". Does she always vote? "Yes." Labour? "No, I wouldn't vote Labour, dear, if you paid me. I vote Conservative. Myself and possibly some comedians are the only people I know who always voted Conservative."

Among the many abominations of modern society for Brown is the amount of time children spend watching TV - even if EastEnders does account for two hours a week.

"And I'm also troubled by how much time they spend on their computers. They all go off into their own rooms, going into - what on earth do they call it - Twitter?" She repeats it witheringly. "Twit-ter. That's what it is. Telling everybody what they're doing! And talking about themselves in the third person. 'June is about to go to the lavatory.' 'June has just changed the sheets on her bed, don't ask her why.' I mean, really."

Her fellow Bafta nominee Stephen Fry Twitters all the time, I tell her. "Does he? Oh, I'm ashamed of him. He's such a lovely man. Such a clever, lovely man with a nice relationship. What does he need to do that for? He should read a book."

Jonathan Ross and Russell Brand get pretty short thrift too, for their prank phone calls to another elderly actor. "Utterly disgraceful, like a couple of stupid schoolkids. And that awful word shagging, which I can't bear. And snog - I hate that. It's so unromantic. I hate it all."

She sinks back in her chair, feigning exhaustion. Laughing, with a final flourish of high camp - a toss of the head, and a melodramatic shudder - she delivers her tremulous verdict. "I loathe it all. Oh it's a horrible world, and I loathe it all".

[SpursFan1902]

It's hard to picture Dot saying "I loathe it all. Oh it's a horrible world and I loathe it all."

[faceless]

On eve of Baftas, we pick Cotton
By DIANA PILKINGTON
and EMMA COX
thescum.co.uk

EASTENDERS legend June Brown is up for a best actress Bafta tomorrow — and she’s already won TV Biz’s vote for the gong. June, 82, who plays chain-smoking busybody Dot Cotton, is the first soap star to be nominated for the prestigious award since Jean Alexander — Corrie’s Hilda Ogden — in 1989. And she is odds-on favourite to win.

June’s nomination — her first in a 50-year career — was for a moving performance last year when she was in an entire episode of the BBC1 soap on her own. Dot recorded a message for husband Jim Branning, who had had a stroke. And the performance was made more poignant by the fact that actor John Bardon, who plays Jim, had a stroke in real life. The actress described it as 'a lovely episode to film' She said: 'Thanks to director Clive Arnold and wonderful crew. I was fortunate to be given the opportunity.'

Barbara Windsor, who plays Peggy Mitchell, said: 'She did the whole thing in about two afternoons and only June could do that. June is the only actress I know that is worthy of that half-hour.' Gillian Taylforth, who played Kathy Mitchell, said:'June deserves to be recognised for her wonderful work in playing the character for so long.' And Cheryl Fergison (Heather Trott) said: 'I learn something new every time I do a scene with June. This nomination is long overdue.'

June will be competing for the gong against Anna Maxwell Martin for Channel 4’s Poppy Shakespeare, Andrea Riseborough for Margaret Thatcher: The Long Walk to Finchley (BBC4), and Maxine Peake for Hancock and Joan (BBC4). She has been in EastEnders since 1985, with a four-year break from 1993.

Dot’s life has been an emotional rollercoaster. Back in 1989, she found out husband Charlie was a bigamist and then her son Nick tried to poison her. In 2000 viewers were moved to tears when she helped friend Ethel to die in a euthanasia pact. Dot has also been jailed for shoplifting, lost her grandson Ashley and been hospitalised for a breakdown.

EastEnders executive producer Diederick Santer said: 'une brings incredible detail and thought to every moment of Dot, and for me, many of her best moments are the things she does with lines of dialogue, looks, pauses and breaths.'

Modest June said of learning of her nomination: 'The cast have been lovely. Everyone is almost more pleased than I am cos I’m a grumpy old thing really. I don’t believe anything is going to happen until it does. I won’t even buy a new dress because it doesn’t look right in a recession, does it?'