Former Coronation Street star Amanda Barrie says she 'would have been sacked' from the soap if she’d come out in the 80s.
The actress is probably best recognise for playing Alma Halliwell in the ITV soap on and off for 20 years.
In 1967, Amanda married theatre director and actor Robin Hunter but they separated in the mid-1980s and never divorced before his death in 2004.
She came out as bisexual in her autobiography It's Not a Rehearsal in 2002 and in September 2014 Amanda married her long-term partner Hilary Bonner.
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But the soap star didn't publicly confirm her sexuality while appearing in Corrie over fears some of her co-stars would have refused to work with her for being gay, the Mirror reports.
Speaking on the Conversation Street podcast, Amanda 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.'"
Amanda, who has also appeared in Carry On Cleo and Carry On Camping, went on: "Now, I fall about, I said, 'Bloody hell, are they opening a gay club in Coronation Street now?'
"What’s going on? How many are they? They’re all coming out. Why didn’t they come out when I was there? I could have had so many hooks if they’d come out.
"I was ahead of the game."
Although she hasn’t been on the ITV soap for 21 years, Amanda - whose character Alma died in a memorable cervical cancer storyline - still watches the show to this day.
She said: "I watch it religiously. I’ll just catch up with the family."
And Amanda may have a few momentos from her time on the cobbles still knocking around.
"I was always wanting a bit of Coronation Street memorabilia," she spilled on the podcast.
"When Bill Roache had his trial that was in London I went to get a car late at night after we’d been filming, they’d taken me down in a car, and Vinnie the prop man said, 'There’s a present for you. It’s under a tea cloth in the car.'"
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