Coronation Street star Amanda Barrie shockingly revealed that the soap's bosses stopped her from publicly coming out as gay.
The soap icon has played Alma Sedgewick on the ITV series for 20 years but wasn't allowed to be her true self.
While starring in the soap from 1981 to 1982 and 1988 to 2001, she refused to confirm her sexuality. It wasn't until after that she come out.
She made an appearance on Wednesday's episode of Loose Women with her wife Hilary Bonner and was asked what it was like being in the closet while on the show.
"There was no camp of any kind at that time," Amanda explained. {There was various people in charge of the show so, they call[ed] the tune. Do we call it homophobic? Call it what you like...
"What people did was they sold you to the press who thought 'there's a story there'."
"The press came and the very same people who would've done that would then say, 'I'm not going to work with someone who's gay'."
The 86-year-old said that all her co-stars were aware of her sexuality and that 'everyone knew I was gay!'
Discussing who she told, Amanda said: "Nobody at Coronation Street knew but my very close friends Helen [Worth], Sue Nicholls and Barbara Knox."
Amanda married her long-term partner Hilary at London's Drury Lane Theatre in 2014. They were together 10 years before they wed.
"I’d been with Hilary for years and we didn’t want to get married before. I kept going, ‘Oh my God, I can’t bear one of those receptions. Ugh!’" the actress said.
"Then when I did pantomime I asked my Dandini [Cinderella’s sidekick] where he got married and he said Drury Lane Theatre. And I went, ‘Hilary! That’s it, we’re doing it!’"
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The star previously insisted that she would have been fired from Coronation Street if she had come out during the 1980s.
Speaking on the Conversation Street podcast, she said: “Every week I would come up to the office. They’d go, ‘You’re coming out.’ ‘Am I?’ ‘Yeah, they’ve got this thing on you.’
"I spent a fortune on solicitors because believe me if that had happened to me at that time they would not have kept me in Coronation Street and I will stand by that.
"Not because of them [the producers] but because of people, who shall be nameless, who would’ve said, ‘I’m not working with her.’"
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