Obituary: Edna Doré, actress

Edna Dore: Actress who was best known for playing Mo Butcher in EastEnders

Edna Doré was a character actor who rose to fame as the bruising battle-axe Mo Butcher – mother of Frank Butcher, landlord of the Queen Vic – in the BBC’s EastEnders. It helped that Doré came from the East End of London and spoke authentic Cockney; she also understood the fabric and traditions of the area. Doré gave the character, despite its forthright nature and withering asides, a loveable authority. She played Mo from 1988 to 1990 and became the acknowledged matriarch of the Butcher family: tough, uncompromising and a real old busy-body.

Doré’s most memorable storyline in the soap came in 1990, when her character began to suffer from Alzheimer’s disease. There were several scenes in which she became increasingly frail and forgetful and by November 1990 she was in the advance stages of mental deterioration. The producers decided the character should be placed in a home and not appear in further episodes.

Doré performed the troubled scenes with much style and sympathy – altering between the harsh reality of the illness and investing the character with an understanding that made the elderly lady credible and endearing.

Doré’s portrayal of the traumas that Mo experienced gained respect from viewers and did much to create a greater understanding of the disease.

Mo was killed off in 1992, but her death was not screened. “I was at the EastEnders New Year’s Eve party,” Dore has recalled, “when someone came up to me and said, ‘Have you seen, you’ve been killed off?’ And I heaved a sigh of relief and had another drink. Still I can’t complain. I had a good time at EastEnders.”

Doré won the Best Supporting Performance accolade in 1989 for High Hopes, the Mike Leigh film that premiered at the Edinburgh Film Festival the previous summer and marked Leigh’s graduation from television drama to one of English cinema’s most distinctive and successful directors.

Mike Leigh has recalled working with Doré: “Edna initially approached the rehearsals for High Hopes with a healthy scepticism, but once she trusted having no script, improvising in character, and me, she entered into the spirit of the thing with unbounded enthusiasm, even playing some scenes with her teeth out.”

Edna Lillian Doré, (nee Gorring) was the younger daughter of a porter at Crystal Palace station and his wife, a cleaner and housemaid.

She attended the Croydon Repertory theatre and worked her way from stage manager to getting occasional cameo parts.

During the war she was a chorus girl with the famous Whitehall Theatre with the strip-tease star Phyllis Dixey. She also met and married in 1946 the actor and director Alexander Doré. The two ran their own company and she spent many years in repertory theatre, principally in Wales.

Doré made her first TV appearance in 1959 and was seen regularly in a wide variety of programmes – notably Z Cars, Dixon of Dock Green, Open All Hours, Tenko, Casualty, Time Gentleman Please, Dr Who (with David Tennant) and (finally in 2011) Midsomer Murders.

She became a stalwart of the TV bingo sitcom Eyes Down with Paul O’Grady. Doré and O’Grady giggled so much that they were ejected from a rehearsal for laughing.

As she made her exit Doré told O’Grady that in 70 years she had never been sent home for bad behaviour.

Despite this television work Doré continued to be a major figure on the West End stage.

In the 1960s, she spent four years playing Mrs Sowerberry in Lionel Bart’s hit musical Oliver! and triumphantly returned to the role when Sir Cameron Macintosh revived the show with Barry Humphries as Fagin.

Another major musical was Billy with Michael Crawford at the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane, in 1974, in which she played Mrs Crabtree. In 1972 she appeared in Alan Bennett’s Getting On.

Doré then joined the Scottish director Bill Bryden’s company at the National Theatre in the small Cottesloe Theatre in London.

Paul Scofield led the company with distinction and Doré acted with him in Keith Dewhurst’s brilliant adaptation of Lark Rise to Candleford, The Iceman Cometh and The Crucible.

Also at the National she made a particularly striking impression in Tony Harrison’s magical version of The Passion, which packed out the Assembly Hall at the Edinburgh Festival of 1980. Doré played Mrs Noah in the first part and Mary’s Mother in part two. She joined in the raucous dances led by the Albion Band with much enthusiasm.

Other films included Gary Oldman’s Nil by Mouth and Les Miserables, and she was also in Leigh’s films All or Nothing with Timothy Spall and the equally gloomy Another Year with Jim Broadbent.

Her husband died in 2002. She is survived by their son.