Coronation Street legend Amanda Barrie insists she would have been sacked from the soap if she had come out as lesbian during the 80s.
The 86-year-old actress played Alma Halliwell on the ITV soap throughout the 80s, finally leaving the role in 2001, whilst secretly living as a gay woman.
Amanda refused to publicly confirm her sexuality over fears some of her co-stars would have refused to work with her for being gay.
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.’
“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 good have had so many hooks if they’d come out.
“I was ahead of the game.”
Amanda is still very proud of her time in Corrie, and she is one of the few stars to own a cobble from the famous Manchester street.
She spilled: “I was always wanting a bit of Coronation Street memorabilia.
"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.’
"And I got into the car and it was a cobble. It was because they’d been putting a ramp in for disabled people and went they put them back they couldn’t fit it in so there was one spare cobble and I’ve got it. I don’t know how many people have got cobbles from Coronation Street but I’ve got one and I can actually tell you exactly where it came from, from outside the corner shop.”
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.”
