June Brown never thought of herself as a star. Whenever the subject of her Dot Cotton fame came up, the EastEnders veteran – who has died today (4 April) at the age of 95 – would wince and roll her eyes. “We’re not stars – we’re household names,” she’d insist. “We’re like Persil or Daz.” Brown was quoting the actor Gretchen Franklin, who for years played Dot’s BFF Ethel, but it was a gag that got to the heart of her own appeal, too. She could be funny, withering and deadpan – both on screen and off – but with a melancholic streak a mile long.
It’s partly why she was so good as Dot. The cigarette-smoking launderette owner was as much an Albert Square staple as the Queen Vic pub – a scolding, misanthropic gossip with a heart of gold and compassion where it mattered. Brown gave her character grit, shading, and a sense of inner conflict. Even if you hadn’t watched Dot since she first appeared on the soap opera in 1985, you felt her years of trauma in Brown’s wilted sadness. Every knock the character had taken in life seemed to have left a bruise – the crooked son she’d blindly defend to the hilt, the ailing friend she’d helped to die, the loved ones who had passed away.
