Anita Carey, actress best known in Coronation Street and Doctors – obituary

Anita Carey, who has died of cancer aged 75, was an award-winning character actress, soap regular and former resident of Coronation Street.

She made her debut in the ITV series for four episodes in 1978 as Brenda Summers, a domestic violence victim befriended by Emily Bishop (Eileen Derbyshire). In 1996 she landed the more substantial role of Joyce Smedley, dolled-up cleaner at the Rover’s Return and meddling mother of Judy Mallett (Gaynor Faye).

Perpetually debt-ridden, with a weakness for catalogues and gambling, Joyce hoped for romance with Alec Gilroy (Roy Barraclough), regional manager of Sunliners travel agency (where she also worked as a cleaner). Alec whisked her away for a night in a Lake District hotel with the immortal promise “there’s a trouser press in every room”, but in the event nothing happened and Gilroy eventually sacked her from Sunliners after catching her stealing from the till.

In 1997 her character was an early victim of the “Corrie Cull” set in train by the soap’s new producer Brian Park to make way for younger actors. Viewers, promised “one of our most dramatic scenes for years”, saw Joyce being hit by a car driven by garage owner Tony Horrocks while chasing her dog, who had slipped his lead, and being hurled from bonnet to windscreen and over the roof. “Scamper!” was her final line.

“Some characters have run their course,” Park said, drily.

In 2007 Anita Carey joined the BBC daytime soap Doctors as the receptionist Vivien March. During her two years in the role her character was raped by a burglar, and her portrayal of Vivien’s struggles to come to terms with the trauma won her the award for Best Dramatic Performance (and Doctors the Best Single Episode) at the 2009 British Soap Awards.

Anita Eileen Carey was born on April 16 1948 in Halifax, Yorkshire, to Sidney Carey, a postal worker, and Louisa, née Crowther, and worked as a typist for a carpet firm before training at the Central School of Speech and Drama in London.

She began her professional career in rep and enjoyed a successful stage career in the provinces before making her West End debut as Alice Hobson in Hobson’s Choice at the Theatre Royal, Haymarket, in 1982.

By this time she had established herself in television comedy as Susan Chambers, sister of Thelma (Brigit Forsyth) who marries Bob Ferris (Rodney Bewes), in Whatever Happened to the Likely Lads? (1973-74). In the first two series (1973 and 1974) of I Didn’t Know You Cared, Peter Tinniswood ’s sitcom about a dour north-of-England working-class family, she was Pat Partington, women’s libber girlfriend, then wife, of Carter Brandon (Stephen Rea).

Anita Carey also starred in John Finch’s drama The Spoils Of War, playing Martha Blaze, before appearing as Joyce, the devoted working class wife of Raymond Gould, an upwardly mobile northern Labour MP trying to shake off his working class roots, in ITV’s 1986 adaptation of Jeffrey Archer’s novel First Among Equals. Other television credits included Last of the Summer Wine, Casualty, Midsomer Murders, Where the Heart Is and Band of Gold.

In 1973 a tour of Simon Gray’s Butley, in which she was playing Miss Heasman, the earnest student whose essay on “Hate and Redemption in A Winter’s Tale” is torn to shreds by the titular alcoholic English lecturer, visited the Crucible Theatre, Sheffield, where she met the actor Mark Wing-Davey. They appeared together in a 1973 production of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde and eventually married in 2002.

In 2008 after Wing-Davey – by then a successful director in the US – became chairman of the graduate acting programme at New York University, they moved to New York, where Anita continued to take on stage and television work.

Her husband survives her with their two daughters.

Anita Carey, born April 16 1948, died July 19 2023