Paula Tilbrook obituary

The actor Paula Tilbrook, who has died aged 89, topped a long career of playing forthright women on television with a 21-year run in the Yorkshire soap Emmerdale as the village gossip Betty Eagleton, who walked back into the life of her wartime sweetheart, Seth Armstrong, in 1994.

Both Betty and Seth were widowed when they reunited, although she had left her scrap-dealer husband Wally before his death. After almost 40 years of marriage, she told Wally to choose between her and his old rag-and-bone horse; he chose the horse.

In the village of Emmerdale – formerly Beckindale – Betty found a job as a cleaner and more than 10 years of happiness with Seth, the wily poacher-turned-gamekeeper. She knew how to play him, knowing that he was a free spirit and would sometimes keep the truth from her. “I thought that, when she met Seth again, perhaps she wished she had chosen him first time round rather than the man she did,” said Tilbrook. “I liked the idea of two people in their autumn years.”

The couple planned a wedding in December 1994 but called it off at the last minute, deciding they were too old to be exchanging vows, and turned the wedding breakfast into a 1940s fancy-dress party for villagers.They lived together until Seth’s death in 2005, then Betty battled on alone – apart from taking in Alan Turner as a lodger – until she emigrated to Australia 10 years later, when Tilbrook retired.

Paula was born in Salford, Lancashire, to Olive (nee Hulmes) and James Tilbrook, a foreman at an engineering company. Acting was her ambition from the age of four, when she played Jill in a Sunday-school production of Jack and Jill. “Something came from the audience that I will never forget – approval and warmth,” she once told me. “It was love from that very second. I was hooked. From the age of 11, I went to a stage school in Manchester, singing and dancing.”

Tilbrook started in repertory theatre as an assistant stage manager in Colwyn Bay and soon landed acting roles, but she took a career break after marrying Leslie Hall in 1952 and giving birth to their son and daughter. She performed with amateur dramatics societies – “there was something missing in my life without it” – before returning to the stage once their children started school.

She appeared on television from 1969, dipping in and out of sitcoms and dramas. There were parts in the director Mike Leigh’s play Hard Labour (1973), as the friend of the cleaner played by Liz Smith, the writer Alan Bennett’s All Day on the Sands (1979), as one of the Morecambe boarding-house guests, and To Play the King (1993), the second in the House of Cards trilogy, as the Commons speaker – at a time when, in real life, Betty Boothroyd, a fellow northerner, had just become the first woman to hold that position.

In sitcoms, Tilbrook had regular roles in Sharon and Elsie (1984-85) as the scatty Mrs Tibbett and in Andy Capp (1988) as Flo, the slothful hero’s rolling pin-wielding wife.

Switching to soap, she joined Brookside as Betty Hughes (1984-85), helping with the “Free George Jackson” campaign, and was seen as five characters in Coronation Street: customers at Miami Modes (1967) and the Kabin (1973); Annie Walker’s pub licensee friends Estelle Plimpton (1977) and Olive Taylor-Brown (1980); and Vivian Barford, who took a shine to Alf Roberts (1991 and 1993).

On radio, Tilbrook acted in dozens of dramas and, in sitcoms, played mothers – of the unemployable, job-hopping Malcolm Atkinson (Mike Goddard) in Malcolm (1978) and Iris Bickerdyke (Su Pollard) in For Better Or for Worse (1993).

She was also a favourite of the comedian Ken Dodd, appearing with him first in the TV series Ken Dodd & the Diddymen (1969-73), then in his radio shows from 1972 to 1991. For Ken Dodd’s Palace of Laughter (1986-87), on radio, billed as his “travelling theatre company setting off on another Tickle Tour”, they broadcast from theatres in the north of England.

On stage, Tilbrook’s best part was the title role in Effie’s Burning, about an elderly woman who claims to be suffering from spontaneous combustion. She performed it in 1987 at the Library Theatre, Manchester, and the Cottesloe auditorium at the National Theatre, London, before reprising it on TV in 1991.

Leslie died in 1985 after suffering from Alzheimer’s disease. She is survived by their children, Greg and Gaynor. Although she died in 2019, news of her death was not released by her family until July 2020.