LYNNE Perrie, who portrayed Ivy Tilsley in Coronation Street for 15 years, has died aged 75.
As the domineering "Poison Ivy", she trod on the toes of factory boss Mike Baldwin and interfered in the personal affairs of son Brian Tilsley. Teamed with Vera Duckworth (played by Liz Dawn), Ivy became the character audiences loved to hate and Perrie would forever be associated with the role.
Success came relatively late in Perrie's working career. She was 38 years old when given her breakthrough role in Ken Loach's 1969 film, Kes, in which she played the mildly dysfunctional single mother of the school-dropout protagonist, and she joined the primetime ITV1 soap a decade later.
Born Jean Dudley and raised in Masbrough, Rotherham, she began her career as a cabaret singer in working-men's clubs with the stage name Dizzy. In 1950, aged 19, she married Derrick Barksby and the couple had their only child, Stephen, the following year.
Perrie suspended her ambitions in showbusiness and took regular employment to support her family, including stints as a "clippie" on the buses and at an Argyle sock factory.
When she made her return to cabaret in 1956 with a new act at the Rotherham Trade Centre, she was well-received and offered many bookings. In the early sixties, she toured as a support act for The Beatles and Sacha Distel.
With Kes, in which Perrie's actor brother Duggie Brown appeared as a milkman, came success on the screen. A number of minor TV roles followed, including that of the maligned residents association secretary Mrs Petty in the ITV sitcom Queenie's Castle, but it was with Coronation Street that Perrie would make her name.
She revelled in Ivy's staunch Roman Catholicism and militant approach to the role of shop steward and soon became one of the lynchpins of the soap. However, her departure in 1994 was marked by rumour rather than celebration. On screen, Ivy Tilsley left the street to join a religious commune and the character died offscreen a year later. The real reasons for Perrie's decision to leave were extensively discussed in the British media. Perrie said that the increasingly infrequent appearance of her character meant she no longer had anything to workwith. The newspapers, however, speculated that Perrie's collagen injections to her lips hadn't pleased the soap's producers.
Perrie viewed her new-found freedom as an opportunity to tell her side of the story and Secrets of the Street: My Life as Ivy Tilsley was published in 1995. Touted as "the book they could not ban", after Granada TV tried to, Perrie told of her extra-marital affairs, alcohol problems and her son's Aids diagnosis in the early 1990s.
She also released Lynne Perrie's Alternative Workout, featured in a TV series, The Ghost of Ivy Tilsley, and appeared on many chat shows, the most notable of which being her performance of I Will Survive on the cult late-night Channel 4 show The Word.
Perrie received offers of work after leaving Coronation Street but poor health made her unable to accept.
Over the years, she fought alcohol and drug addictions, mental health problems and, in 2001, a heart scare.
She died at her home on Friday night, following a stroke, with her husband and son at her bedside.
Lynne Perrie (Jean Dudley), actress; born April 7, 1931, died March 24, 2006.
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