SOAP legend Anita Dobson can still remember the moment she realised that EastEnders landlady Angie Watts had become a national treasure.
She had just stepped into the VIP section of Wembley Stadium after being invited to watch Queen perform there by her future husband, rocker Brian May.
Then the crowd — who were previously glued to their musical heroes on stage — spotted the queen of The Queen Vic on the big screens and suddenly turned their attention to a dumbstruck Anita.
The actress recalls: “I came in and I was sort of looking around like, ‘Wow!’
“Then they all started clapping and chanting, ‘Angie, Angie!’ And I remember thinking, ‘That’s me!’ ”
“That was the first time it hit me powerfully, because, you can imagine, it was the whole crowd.
“I remember thinking, ‘They’re not cheering Queen at this point, they’re cheering Angie Watts — and that’s ME!
“Then I went back to my little flat in Stepney, like nothing had happened. It was like a dream.
“So it was big leap. I went from zero to 100mph overnight.”
Anita, now 75, made her debut on EastEnders in the soap’s very first episode in February 19, 1985, as the long-suffering wife of Albert Square landlord “Dirty Den” Watts, played by the late Leslie Grantham.
Speaking on Lacey Turner’s We Started Here podcast ahead of the show celebrating its 40th birthday next week, the actress says she was totally blindsided by the celebrity world she found herself in.
That is despite the fact she ended up falling marrying one of the world’s most famous rock stars — the future Sir Brian May — and eventually becoming Lady May.
But when she initially met her husband-to-be in 1986, Anita did not have a clue who he was, and actually became better pals with Queen frontman Freddie Mercury.
She said: “I went to a preview of the film Down And Out In Beverly Hills with my then-agent and a kind of boyfriend — I’m not sure if we were on or off at the time.
“Brian turned up and that was the first time we met.
“He was married at the time — I didn’t know that — but he was with his wife.
“She said, ‘I think you’re marvellous in EastEnders’ and then he said, ‘I think you’re marvellous too.
“You should come along and see us at Wembley.’
“I turned round and went: ‘Who the hell is that?’
“And a person behind me said, ‘Don’t you know who that is? It’s only the lead guitarist with Queen.’
“But as a result of that meeting I came to be friends with Fred, and I didn’t really get together with Brian until much later — until all the stuff of life had happened with his marriage and whatever.
“It was Fred I used to hang out with a lot, and Brian kind of introduced me to Fred and Fred kind of gave me back to him, if you like.”
Anita was introduced to the nation by EastEnders when she was 35 and an unknown jobbing actress who had previously juggled theatre work with pulling pints in bars.
She used the landladies she had worked under in pubs around London as her inspiration for Angie, along with a dash of Judy Garland and hints of her own mother.
Her parents raised her in Stepney, East London, where she already had the perfect accent to play the role that provided her big break.
But back in the Sixties and Seventies, opinion was still divided on whether it was better to adopt a posh accent — and Anita had considered ditching it completely.
She left school at 16 and didn’t go to university but got a grant to go to the Webber Douglas drama school in the rather high-class South Kensington in West London.
Anita recalled: “I still had a really bad Cockney accent — you could cut cheese with it.
“Going to a drama school where everybody talked so nicely. I tried to talk like they did.
“My drama teacher said, ‘You can’t talk like that, darling, you just can’t.’
“You have to lower your voice so you have the possibility to do Shakespeare or Chekhov or Ibsen.
“But one thing she said, ‘Never lose your accent — it’s what will make or break you’ — and boy, was she right!
“Because the next thing that happened was EastEnders.”
Anita was also lucky that her parents scraped together enough savings and decided to send her to Italy where she got a makeover and returned already looking more like the Angie Watts viewers would come to know and love.
It even ensured she beat a rival actress to the role.
She recalled: “The reason the other girl didn’t work was she didn’t look right.
‘STORMIEST RELATIONSHIPS’
“They wanted someone that was a bit more ‘chi chi’, looked a bit smarter, like a businesswoman that happened to run a pub.
“So the suit did work and the fact the hair was neat and tidy and I had lots of jewellery — it was the look of somebody in control.
“Angie looked all-powerful like she could control anything. But the one thing she couldn’t handle was her marriage.”
Although she got on famously with co-star Leslie, the TV couple had one of the stormiest relationships in soapland, which was an integral part of the early EastEnders’ success story.
The drama reached a peak on Christmas Day, 1986, when more than 30million fans tuned in to see serial womaniser Den hand his alcoholic wife divorce papers after discovering she had lied about suffering from terminal cancer.
The only reason Den and Angie stayed together was for the love of their daughter, Sharon.
Letitia Dean, the actress who plays Sharon, and Anita called each other “second mother and baby girl.”
Anita said: “I fell in love with Letitia the minute I met her.
“We used to have lots of nights out and she stayed at my flat lots of times.
“We used to go out with the girls — Gillian Taylforth (who plays Kathy Beale) and Sandy Ratcliff — who was Sue Osman.
“We were the four musketeers going out a lot together.”
Anita left the show on May 19, 1988, and has since taken on jobs on stage and screen including her most recent, a recurring role on Doctor Who.
But she has never quite shaken off her former character — the Queen Vic matriarch.
“There will always be a lot of Angie in me,” said Anita. “I am very, very proud of her.”
- We Started Here With Lacey Turner interviewing Anita Dobson is available from Tuesday.
PAM GOT INSPO ON THE BUSES
EastEnders icon Pam St Clement has revealed the inspiration behind her character Pat Wicks’ famous earrings.
The actress spills the beans in an upcoming documentary celebrating the soap’s landmark birthday.
She tells fellow Albert Square star Ross Kemp, who presents the show: “When I got the part of Pat, like any actor I decided to do a bit of homework.
“I saw this bus conductress on a number 38 bus and she was wearing these most dangly earrings.”
And she told how viewers helped shape the Queen Vic landlady’s look.
Pam explained: “Pat always wears the earrings that fit her mood.
“You know those tool boxes you can get that fold up?
“I had one of those and a wall bracket with dangling earrings, but the interesting thing is most of them came from viewers.
“They’d say, ‘I saw these in the market and I thought they were absolutely right for Pat.’”
In EastEnders: 40 Years On The Square, which airs on BBC One on Monday at 8pm, Ross speaks to a host of the soap’s stars.
They include Letitia Dean, who plays his ex-wife Sharon, with whom he starred in the explosive “Sharongate” storyline in 1994.
He also interviews Shaun Williamson, who played the doomed Barry Evans, as well as Michael Cashman who took on the role of gay yuppy Colin Russell – a revolutionary TV role back in 1986.
And Ross catches up with Gillian Taylforth, better known as Kathy Beale, who was married to Grant’s brother, Phil Mitchell.
Gillian recalled how similar her market-trading character was to herself.
She said: “Coming from a big family – there are four girls and one boy in my family – and we were born in Islington.
“And I used to work up Chapel Street Market.
“My boyfriend at the time had a stall there, so Saturday and Sunday I used to help him out.”
Ross also talked to Adam Woodyatt, aka Kathy’s son Ian Beale, who praised the vision of show co- creator Tony Holland, which helped the soap to endure.
He said: “Tony had mapped it all out years ahead, and we were all based on members of his family. Ian was based on his nephew.”
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