As she admits with a characteristic broad grin, Anita Dobson has ‘been around a while’. In her time, the 69-year-old veteran has done it all, from starring in the most-watched moment in British television history, through waltzing across Wembley Arena in Strictly Come Dancing, to regularly delivering robust opinions as a panellist on Loose Women.
Now she is about to star in a new play in the West End written by the comedian Katy Brand called 3Women, telling the story of three generations of, well, women.
‘A play just about women?’ she says in mock astonishment. ‘There’s not a chance of something like this being staged even five years ago, never mind when I was first starting out. But the world’s changing. It’s all about #MeToo, about equality. It’s a fascinating, enthralling, maybe even a little frightening time.’
Anita Dobson is about to star in a new play in the West End written by the comedian Katy Brand called 3Women, telling the story of three generations of women
In the play, Dobson takes on the role of Eleanor, the matriarch of a family, in tense, dramatic, often hilarious conversations with her daughter and granddaughter. The three talk about what women want and expect out of life and how hopes and ambitions have changed. And it has given the actress who first found fame as Angie Watts in EastEnders pause for thought about the hand women have been dealt, not least in her trade.
‘I don’t know if there’s any woman of my age in this profession who hasn’t come across it,’ she says of sexual coercion in her world. ‘I’d say it would be impossible not to have done.’ And she reckons in the past, before the Harvey Weinstein scandal, it was left to individual women to police things for themselves.
‘It was up to you how you dealt with it,’ she says of unwarranted advances. ‘I was brought up in the East End, and if a man was inappropriate in a bar you’d throw your drink over him. You’d sort it. As my mother always said: solar plexus first, then the kneecaps.’
Anita Dobson in 3Women. Anita Dobson in EastEnders with Leslie Grantham and Letitia Dean (right)
The daughter of a tailor and a seamstress, she had a yearning for the stage from the moment she saw a pantomime as a four-year-old. After drama school she spent the first 13 years of her career treading the boards of repertory theatre. But, she says, even there it was clear what some men expected of their female colleagues.
‘It was always a world of deals: you give me that, I’ll give you this,’ she says. ‘There were two ways of dealing with it. Either you’d go along with it or you’d say, “Thank you very much, not for me” and get out of there. That’s what I’ve done. But then I’ve never been a great beauty, I’ve not had to trade on my looks. If you do there’s huge pressure. And I know some who refused to acquiesce suffered for that and didn’t work for ages.’
The thing that cemented her reputation as a woman not to be trifled with was her stint as Angie, the seldom-sober landlady of the Queen Vic in EastEnders. She was in the soap for only three years but it completely transformed her life. Not least when more than half the country tuned in to watch her being handed divorce papers by her errant husband Dirty Den on Christmas Day 1986.
‘I went from 0 to 100 overnight,’ she remembers. ‘You’re being watched by 30 million people – it’s hair-raising. But how exciting. It put me in a place where I was no longer obliged to bang away at auditions. People wanted me.’
Among the things she was offered was a record. In 1986, Anyone Can Fall In Love, sung to the EastEnders theme, got to No 4. The lyrics proved to be prophetic, and it was when she appeared on Top Of The Pops that she had the most important encounter of her life, meeting Brian May of Queen. He was married at the time but they have been together ever since. Her relationship with the astrophysics-loving guitarist allowed her to depart Walford in 1988.
In the play, Dobson takes on the role of Eleanor, the matriarch of a family, in tense, dramatic, often hilarious conversations with her daughter and granddaughter
‘I got to the point where I’d played drunk pretty much every which way,’ she says. ‘You think, do I go round again or do I try something new? I’d been a jobbing actress, I owed it to myself to see if I could go out there and see where it took me.’ The variety of her work has encompassed Gertrude in Hamlet and Madame Morrible in the musical Wicked.
When Angie was killed off, she says, ‘I admit I did a little jig of celebration. I could move on’. These days, she rarely watches the show that made her name. ‘When I was in it, I watched it religiously. I wanted to check I hadn’t screwed up. That’s what you’re always worried about as an actor: am I going to be found out?’
‘3Women’ is at the Trafalgar Studios, London, until Jun 9