Jenny Connor is a firm favourite among fans of Coronation Street, but it's hard to believe that her first appearance on the cobbles was actually more than 30 years ago.
Sally Ann Matthews, who plays the now-Rovers Return landlady, became a young star of Coronation Street when she joined the soap at the age of 16. The Oldham actress was cast in 1986 as Jenny Bradley - the daughter of villain Alan Bradley who was taken in by mother figure Rita Tanner - then Rita Fairclough - while her father worked away.
After five years, Sally quit the show in pursuit of other roles. She returned briefly in 1993, before making a huge comeback in 2015 when Jenny started dating Kevin Webster. However, dealing with the loss of losing her four-year-old son Tom two years earlier when he drowned in a paddling pool, she snatched Kevin's son Jack in order to keep him safe and nearly threw herself off a balcony, resulting in her getting sectioned.
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She then didn't return to the street again in 2016 when Rita took pity on her. She soon started work at Underworld and began a relationship with factory boss Johnny Connor. The pair then wed the following year before buying the Rovers together in 2018. But it wasn't smooth sailing as Johnny's affair with Liz McDonald caused significant marital problems, but they managed to keep their relationship together until Jenny confessed to her infidelity with Ronnie Bailey in 2021.
That same year, just after the pair finally appeared to be giving back into their former feelings for one another, Johnny died in the street's sinkhole disaster, after he tried to save her when she became trapped under the cobbles amid Harvey Gaskell's terrfying Halloween reign.
Jenny has since faced a failed relationship with Leo Thompkins, who didn't leave her for Canada but was in fact bumped off by Stephen Reid, and her current potential romance with Owen Longford also appears set to hit the rails, due to the serial-killing businessman's interference.
Luckily, away from the ITV soap, Jenny actress Sally Ann is happily married to senior barrister Nicholas Rhodes, having tied the knot in 1999. But the soap star previously revealed how her screen commitment made it difficult to strike up romantic relationships at the start of her career.
She said: "I never even went to a nightclub and snogged somebody because I thought they might sell a story." But, more than 20 years ago, Sally Ann actually surprised her family and friends with a secret wedding on the same day as her birthday and her son's christening.
Speaking to Kate Thornton on White Wine Question Time with co-star Sally Carman, Sally Ann was asked about the moments of her life that most resembled a soap opera, and told the story of her surprise wedding to QC Nick after the birth of her son, James. She said: "I never wanted to get married, ever. I wanted to be with somebody and for me, the decision to have a child was a much bigger commitment. So we decided that we would start a family and we did.
"Then as soon as James was born, I kind of went: 'Oh I want the same name as everybody else. So all right, I'll marry you now but I don't want a fuss and you're rubbish at remembering dates. So we'll get married on my birthday at James's christening.'
"So that's what we did. Every year on my birthday I forget it's also my wedding anniversary! So he always remembers but I always forget. We had the christening and then we were at the reception and the only people that knew were my two little bridesmaids."
Sally Ann and Nick live together in London and have two children, and while she often shares photos of her husband on her Instagram, her boys, Louis and James, are more rarely seen. In one post, Nick was captured with Sally's former on-screen husband, played by Richard Hawley, when he exited the soap.
She captioned it: "The real one and the pretend one. I’m going to miss my Manchester husband terribly. Thank you Rich for a fab five years x".
Last summer, Sally Ann beamed with pride alongside Nick as she joined James at what appeared to be his graduation, due to the fact he was sporting a cap and gown. "Our boy," she simply captioned the post, which was soon flooded with congratulatory messages from her fans and followers.
But the last time she was seen in a social media snap with both her sons was in November 2021, when the family headed off on a French getaway. Posing in front of the Arc de Triomphe, Sally Ann penned: "We walked, we ran. We ate, we drank. We walked some more. We had a bloody brilliant time x #RhodesOuting."
But, back to her career, and Sally Ann has previously opened up about the toll her acting career had on her childhood, with her struggling to fit in at school. She had to balance the pressures of fame with the usual insecurities of being a teenage girl and nasty comments from those in showbiz even caused her to develop an eating disorder.
Speaking to the Mirror ahead of her return to the cobbles in 2015, she admitted that a remark from a TV critic about how she looked led to a battle with bulimia, an eight-month ordeal that Sally had kept quiet for 20 years. "When I was in Corrie first time around there was no real celebrity culture. No Twitter, Facebook," she explained. "In those days, before social media, people were much more focused on the TV critics – who were sort of celebrities themselves."
She recalled a critic made a damaging comment after Jenny got engaged to a French boy, which said 'what would a handsome Frenchman boy like Patric see in a little pudding like Jenny Bradley?' For me, that was then eight months of active bulimia and then recovery," she said.
During a break from Coronation Street in 2005, Sally joined the cast of Emmerdale as farmer's wife Sandra Briggs, but left less than a year later. Sally also starred in Waterloo Road in 2007 as Alison Lawson, and My Mad Fat Diary as Kester's Wife. Her other credits include Heartbeat, Brassed Off, Doctors and The Royal.
And, if it wasn't for joining Corrie, Sally Ann may never have known that she has a fellow actress cousin who happens to be one of the soap's legends. In a one-off documentary Coronation Street's DNA Secrets in September 2018, Sally-Ann found out that fellow Corrie actress Amanda Barrie, who played Alma Baldwin, is her cousin.
The programme saw a number of Weatherfield favourites taking a DNA test and working alongside Ancestry.com to find out how far across the world their roots had spread. But for Sally-Ann it turned out that her genealogical links could be found very close to home. After travelling to nearby Ashton-under-Lyne to meet with a local historian, it was revealed that her genetic cousin was Amanda, who starred in the soap between 1981 and 2001.
As Amanda surprised her one-time co-star, the veteran actress was seen playfully asking: “Have you found any money in the family?” Speaking to the Radio Times at the time, Sally Ann said of her discovery: "Waiting for my Corrie cousin to come around the corner was torture – I was praying it was someone I liked! The joy when I saw it was Amanda was overwhelming and I thought, ‘well, of course it is, that all makes sense now.’
"We rarely had scenes together but, because of the way we worked back then, we were all in the rehearsal room together and knew everyone really well. I think we share a naughty, slightly bonkers streak. And the fact that the gift of a jug that Amanda gave me when I was 18 has been on every kitchen shelf I’ve ever had – and was one of my most treasured possessions even before I knew – clearly means something."
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