Amanda Barrie reveals she feared being sacked from Coronation Street over her sexuality
– 2 min read
Amanda Barrie has opened up about her long-standing fear of being dismissed from Coronation Street due to her sexuality, shedding light on the challenges faced by LGBTQ+ individuals in the entertainment industry during the 1980s and 1990s.
Barrie, who played the beloved character Alma Sedgewick on the ITV soap from 1981 to 2001, revealed in recent interviews that she believed she would have been sacked had she come out as bisexual while still on the show. Speaking on This Morning and Good Morning Britain, the 89-year-old actress said: “I know that I would have been sacked from Coronation Street, they would have got rid of me... it would have been a general ‘we don’t want anything to do with that’.”
She recalled that just a week and a half into her role, someone leaked details of her private life to the press. “Somebody shopped me to the press, somebody I should have known better,” she said. Barrie described the atmosphere at the time as one of fear and exclusion, noting that people believed being around someone who wasn’t “straight down the middle” was somehow contagious.
Barrie kept her sexuality private throughout her time on the show, only coming out publicly in her 2002 autobiography It’s Not A Rehearsal. She later married crime novelist Hilary Bonner in 2014. Reflecting on her decision to stay closeted, she said: “I spent a fortune on solicitors, because believe me if that had happened to me at that time they would not have kept me in Coronation Street.”
Despite her fears, Barrie said the response after she came out was overwhelmingly positive. “I thought I was going to be stoned in the streets,” she admitted, “but I got a lot of hugs, actually, and it was never mentioned, never brought up, just taken, accepted.”
Now approaching her 90th birthday, Barrie remains a fan of the show and is pleased to see how far it has come in terms of LGBTQ+ representation. “Now, I fall about laughing. I said, ‘Bloody hell, are they opening a gay club in Coronation Street now?’” she joked.
