When the Coronation Street star Jean Alexander accompanied a member of the Friends of York Opera, Helen Wilkinson, to an aftershow party in the early 1990s, I found her in the kitchen, up to her elbows in the sink, doing the washing up. She was only too happy to be treated as just another supporter, a friend of a friend. At the Quaker funeral in 2006 of Donald Bodley, director of the city’s Theatre Royal when Jean was there at the start of her career in the late 50s, she gave a moving tribute. Modest and down-to-earth, she displayed great qualities of humour, loyalty and fondness for friendships.
