Coronation Street legend Amanda Barrie says she would have been SACKED for coming out as a lesbian
EX CORONATION Street star Amanda Barrie has revealed she didn't come out as gay in case she was fired.
Amanda, who played Alma Sedgewick on the ITV soap for 20 years, admitted she was too frightened to reveal the truth about her sexuality in case she was sacked from the popular soap.
The 86-year-old actress refused to publicly confirm her sexuality while starring on the soap, over fears some of her co-stars would have refused to work with her.
Speaking on the Conversation Street podcast, she said: “Every week I would come up to the office. They’d go, ‘You’re coming out.’ ‘Am I?’
‘Yeah, they’ve got this thing on you.’
“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 and I will stand by that.
“Not because of them [the producers] but because of people, who shall be nameless, who would’ve said, ‘I’m not working with her.’
“Now, I fall about, I said, ‘Bloody hell, are they opening a gay club in Coronation Street now?’
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“What’s going on? How many are they? They’re all coming out. Why didn’t they come out when I was there? I good have had so many hooks if they’d come out.
“I was ahead of the game.”
In 2016, Amanda opened up on her concerns about her sexuality in a brutally honest Loose Women interview.
Amanda - who is happily married to writer Hilary Bonner - admitted she was terrified of the truth coming out at the height of her fame.
She said: "The trouble was with me that someone had tipped them [the paparazzi] off that I was...there was an interest in my sexuality shall we say.
"And I remember just being absolutely terrified because I knew at that time, I think I'm right to say, I would have lost my job.
"Not now, but I honestly believed it that.
"I also felt really guilty myself because they made me feel guilty.
"I was playing Alma and then I had this whole other life and I felt like I couldn't look anybody in the eye."
Amanda told she'd suffered from "tremendous anxiety" as a result of her secret.
She said: "I was terrified, there was an attitude that certain people wouldn’t work with you, it was taboo."
Commenting on how attitudes have altered, she added: "Everything changes so quickly – in a wonderful way.";
The TV star, who tied the knot with writer Hilary Bonner in 2014, confessed only a few close friends on the long-running soap knew the truth.
Amanda explained: "Nobody at Coronation Street knew but my very close friends Helen [Worth], Sue Nicholls and Barbara Knox."
Amanda was with Hilary ten years before they wed at London's Drury Lane Theatre, but the Carry On favourite admits she wasn't at first very keen on the idea.
"I’d been with Hilary for years and we didn’t want to get married before. I kept going, ‘Oh my God, I can’t bear one of those receptions. Ugh!’
She went on: "Then when I did pantomime I asked my Dandini [Cinderella’s sidekick] where he got married and he said Drury Lane Theatre. And I went, ‘Hilary! That’s it, we’re doing it!’
"It’s my favourite theatre – the first place I went when I arrived in London at 13. I said my prayer on Drury Lane steps, ‘Please can I be in the theatre?’
"I’ve never played there except a charity show, although that was my ambition. So we married there instead."
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Before coming out at the age of 67, Amanda was married to actor Robin Hunter.
They wed in 1967 when Amanda was 31, but separated in the 1980s.
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