Former Coronation Street actress Anita Carey dies, aged 75
Carey was a star of the stage and screen, known for her role as Joyce Smedley in the ITV soap.
Actress Anita Carey has died aged 75, following a 13-year battle with breast cancer.
Known as a brilliant comic-actress in the mid-1970s – first establishing herself by playing Susan Chambers in Whatever Happened to the Likely Lads? – Anita stepped onto the famous Coronation Street cobbles in 1978, when she played Brenda Summers, a victim of domestic violence who was befriended by Emily Bishop (played by Eileen Derbyshire).
The star, who was born on 16th April 1948, returned to the Street two decades later as Joyce Smedley, the mother of Judy Mallett (Gaynor Faye).
Playing the role for a year from 1996, Joyce worked as a cleaner at the Rovers Return pub and Sunliners travel agency – before she met her untimely end when she was knocked down by a car driven by Tony Horrocks (Lee Warburton) in February 1997.
Away from Corrie, Anita's glittering career saw her star as Pat Partington in the first two seasons (1973 and 1974) of I Didn't Know You Cared; in the 1980 drama In the Spoils of War as Martha Blaze; as Joyce Gould, devoted wife of the northern Labour MP Raymond, in the 1986 adaptation of Jeffrey Archer's novel First Among Equals for ITV; and in 1990, she played unmarried mother Linda – who moved in with her fish and chip shop-owning brother Brian (Tim Healy) and ultimately fell for his friend Trevor (Richard Griffiths) – in third season of sitcom A Kind of Living.
Moving back to the soapworld in 2007, Anita portrayed the role of Vivien March – receptionist at the Mill Health Centre – in Doctors for almost 400 episodes. Before her exit in 2009, Anita won a British Soap Award for Best Dramatic Performance as her storyline saw Vivien cope with the ordeal of being raped by a burglar.
Born in Halifax, West Yorkshire, Anita studied at the Central School of Speech and Drama in London before taking on a number of theatre roles on tour.
In 2002, she married the actor Mark Wing-Davey – best known for playing Zaphod Beeblebrox in the radio and television versions of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy – and the couple moved to New York six years later.
Despite her cancer diagnosis in 2010, Anita continued to do what she loved, and acted on stage in Berkeley, Washington and New York.
Per The Guardian, she passed away on 19th July 2023, and is survived by Mark and their daughters, Zanna and Isabella.
