Anne Reid

British television gives certain actors a career shape that film never would, and Anne Reid has one of the best examples of it. She played Valerie Barlow in Coronation Street from 1961 to 1971, a decade inside a soap that would have typecast most people permanently. It did not. She came back as Jean in the sitcom dinnerladies between 1998 and 2000, and then found the richest work of her life after seventy.

Her instrument is a flat, unhurried northern delivery that gives away nothing, so the audience has to decide for itself whether the line was kindness, disappointment or a threat. Hot Fuzz uses it for exactly that purpose as Leslie Tiller. So does A Close Shave, where Wendolene is warm and faintly wrong at the same time, which is the whole joke.

The Mother, in 2003, handed her a leading role at the age when British screens usually stop offering them. Then Last Tango in Halifax ran from 2012 to 2020 with her as Celia Dawson and brought a BAFTA Television Award nomination for Best Actress. A second nomination in the same category followed for The Sixth Commandment in 2023, which is not among the credits listed here.

She has kept working steadily: Lady Denham in Sanditon, Muriel Deacon in Years and Years, Mrs Rouncewell in Bleak House, and Nancy in Riot Women in 2025. Born in Newcastle upon Tyne in 1935, she is one of the few actors whose best decade was her eighth.