Over seven decades, the character actor Barbara Young, who has died aged 92, progressed from appearing in pioneering stage plays with Joan Littlewood’s Theatre Workshop – everything from “ballad operas” to Shakespeare and Brecht – to the West End and scores of television programmes. Such was her longevity and versatility that she notched up four different roles in Coronation Street. The last, Doreen Fenwick, gave her an unusually lengthy 10-month screen run in 2007.
The bubbly, flirtatious character, once a member of Charlie Roscoe’s Exotic Dancers, was introduced as a friend and old trouper from Rita Sullivan’s singing days on the club circuit. Rita (Barbara Knox) enjoyed reminiscing about old times and Doreen helped out at her newsagent’s, the Kabin, where she received a marriage proposal from Rita’s assistant, Norris Cole (Malcolm Hebden).
Young had an even longer run in the Channel 5 soap Family Affairs, from 1998 to 2005, as another character leaving the smell of the greasepaint behind. Sadie Hargreaves, a flamboyant former actor, worked behind the bar at the Lock restaurant and married the dying Jeff Lloyd in an unsuccessful attempt to bag his inheritance.
Switching to comedy, Young played Nora Batty’s free-spirited sister Stella in the final throes of Last of the Summer Wine (2008-10).
But her screen career embraced so much more than soap and comedy. When her husband, Jack Pulman, adapted I, Claudius for an acclaimed 12-part BBC serialisation of Robert Graves’s novels about Roman decadence and debauchery in 1976, she took the role of Agrippinilla, the fourth wife and niece of Derek Jacobi’s emperor and mother of the future emperor Nero (Christopher Biggins) – whom she seduces. “It makes Bouquet of Barbed Wire seem almost tame,” wrote one critic.
In other celebrated Pulman adaptations, Young played Anna Scherer in War and Peace (1972) and Madame Lippevechsel in Crime and Punishment (1979), both for the BBC, and Miss Scatcherd in the 1970 film Jane Eyre.
In 1978, she was a regular in the first series of ITV’s Hazell as Dot Wilmington, a tough debt collector renting office space to Nicholas Ball’s private eye. Her character was also notable, in retrospect, for being a lesbian without her sexuality being made an issue.
Barbara was born in Brighouse, in the West Riding of Yorkshire, to Dora (nee Ratcliffe) and Jack Young, who sold insurance. Both dabbled in amateur dramatics, while her sister, Mary, went on to become a concert pianist.
In her teens, Young won prizes in local elocution competitions. When she trained as an actor with Esme Church at Bradford Civic Theatre, another of her teachers there, the modern-dance choreographer Rudolph Laban, recommended her to Littlewood, who ran the radical company Theatre Workshop, based in Manchester, producing “people’s theatre”.
On joining in 1951, she lodged with Harry H Corbett (later to star in Steptoe and Son on TV) and his aunt, Annie Williams, in Wythenshawe. Like the productions, running the company was a collaborative effort, with Young taking some responsibility for finding furniture and props.
That year, she sang and played her battered old guitar on the tour “bus” – a 1938 Post Office lorry with the top of an old furniture van attached – as the actors performed folk and Spanish civil war songs while passing through Welsh mining towns to perform at local venues.
There was often friction in the company. Once, when Young was late arriving after an emergency dental appointment, Littlewood refused to believe the excuse. “She actually pushed me,” Young recalled, “and it hurt, and I just lashed out and clouted her one.”
Littlewood was more riled on walking into the wardrobe room one day to find Young in a compromising position with Gerry Raffles, Littlewood’s boyfriend following the break-up of her marriage to Ewan MacColl, who was still a leading light in Theatre Workshop. MacColl persuaded Littlewood not to sack Young because they needed her acting talent.
In 1953, the company established a permanent base at the Theatre Royal in Stratford, east London. Young made her last Theatre Workshop appearances at the Paris international theatre festival in 1955.
She married Pulman the following year, when she also made her West End debut in the Peter Myers revue For Amusement Only at the Apollo theatre, Shaftesbury Avenue. In 1958, she sang with Henry Hall’s band in his BBC television show.
Young’s later West End musical roles included Maxine in Richard Harris’s Stepping Out (Duke of York’s theatre, 1984-85) and Connie in Budgie (Cambridge theatre, 1988-89), Don Black and Mort Shuman’s adaptation of the TV series.
She started notching up an incredible number of character roles on TV from the early 1960s. Her first three in Coronation Street were Betty Ridgeway (1961), a “hostess” at the Orinoco Club who turned down Billy Walker’s advances; Dot Stockwell (1982), whose husband Wilf had an affair with Elsie Tanner; and Barbara Platt, mother of Martin (1991), first seen giving his fiancee, Gail, a slinky blue slip to wear at the wedding.
More recently, she returned to soap for a brief run in Hollyoaks (in 2012) as Scott Sabeka’s grandmother, Mags. She also had three different roles in the afternoon serial Doctors between 2006 and 2016.
Pulman died of a heart attack in 1979. Young is survived by their daughters, Cory, an actor and director, and Liza, a singer, comedian and member of the musical-comedy trio Fascinating Aida, as well as two grandchildren, Maddy and Isadora.
• Barbara Young, actor, born 9 February 1931; died 27 April 2023
