It's easy to assume that actors know what will happen to their characters months in advance. Yet though Amanda Barrie harboured a sneaking suspicion that Alma and Mike would get back together, marriage scarcely crossed her mind. "It didn't dawn on me that I was now Mrs Baldwin until the credits came up one day and I thought 'Oh look - you married the little devil!' "

On the other hand, she's had enough roles to keep Jim's Cafe in business for months since changing her name from Shirley Ann Broadbent and hitting the bright lights in her teens. Her love affair with the theatre started even earlier. "My grandfather had something to do with it: He was quite a famous Lancashire character who hot a golden handshake from the railways and finished up buying into the theatre. He started people like the Crazy Gang and Jack Hilton. When I first went on stage at the age of three, he would take me to the theatre and shout out very loudly from the box what I shouldn't be doing. he dragged me off a train once and introduced me to Buster Keaton because he thought I ought to meet him, so it goes back a long way.

"I left home when I was thirteen and a half," Amanda continues, "because you really couldn't work from Manchester in those days. I got asked to leave ballet school because I took a four month vacation by going off to panto in Glasgow. I came back and went to live at the Theatre Girls' Club in London."
Amanda describes her career as going "in stages - by mistake"! Setting her sights beyond a dancing career, she went into Revue "because they always gave me comedy bits to do. Someone spotted me and I went to the Bristol Old Vic and skipped the whole thing of doing rep." Her have-a-go attitude brought a variety of parts that could - and perhaps someday, will - fill a book. "I was an understudy to the comics when I was in the chorus and played with Harry Gordon as Dame once, when I was about fifteen. he also made me do a tap act with a friend once so I have actually been the opening tap act the Glasgow Empire. That was a baptism of fire - they would stick you out the re, you would tap for your life and get off!"
Next stop was London's theatreland where Amanda still maintains her permanent base. "My first West End lead was with George Cole in A Public Mischief at the St Martins and then I did Any Wednesday with Dennis Price at the Apollo Theatre - this was interspersed with doing an awful lot of television. The only real training I had had was ballet training: I never studied acting which I hope nobody notices. I had to do everything and I suppose if you put your mind to it you can. The thing I was never very comfortable about was doing television...Ha Ha!

Her first television appearance was with Morecambe and Wise in RunningWild, "and I disgraced myself because my skirt fell off, live on TV! At the same time we were doing Cool for Cats, me and Una Stubbs: every week we would dance to Top Twenty music." From sketches and shows with the likes of Jimmy Edwards and Leslie Crowther, Spike Milligan and the Goons - "I always seemed to be one of the dancers who got the sketches" - Amanda graduated to musicals like Grab Me A Gondola. A spell as hostess on Double Your Money preceded the Carry On films.
"All those things were happening at the same time. Quite often I would be jumping in a taxi from the TV studio to go and perform on stage. I remember when I did Carry On Cleo and they got the dates wrong: I opened in the West End with She Loves Me and missed the band call for my opening night because I was in the taxi coming back from Elstree taking off Cleopatra and putting on my 1920's makeup!"

At the time, Amanda little realised the Carry On films would prove as enduring as they have. "It was over so quick. They were the fastest films ever shot; they were all over in a few weeks and you were only on it for about ten days. My agent stopped me from doing them as much as Barbara (Windsor) to stop me from being typecast as a dizzy lady". Amanda and Barbara also appeared together in cabaret at Winston's as the accompanying picture shows.

Though Amanda became a Coronation Streetregular in 1988, she'd first appeared several years earlier to run screen husband Jim Sedgewick's cafe. And her first scene couldn't have been more daunting, bringing her face to face with Pat Phoenix. "She came for a job at the cafe and I had to tell her she couldn't have one. that was quite sczry. It was my first episode but i didn't think the Street took me to it's heart because i wasn't called for another eight years. By that time, Jim had gone - I never actually met him!"

The Press have since built Alma up as the next Elsie Tanner, but Amanda remains unimpressed. "I think they always do that. There was only on Elsie Tanner, and I think they will go on looking."
Recapturing her native North Country accent was one of the role's greatest challenges. "It had been hammered out of me," Amanda admits. "I went straight from doing Noel Coward to Coronation Streetso I had to remember how to speak like what I did when I was little."
Amanda's late mum was a Street fanatic. "Wehn I was doing my first stint, I didn't think I was very good, but my mother told me one day that she had run the Coronation Street offices complaining that Alma Sedgewick was being taken off 'because all of us hairdressers are desperately upset'. When she died, within days I was back in Coronation Street and whenever I am on the set I think about her and think, 'I bet it was you who got me into this'. because she would be thirlled now.
When she first saw me onstage she struck a mathc to let me know where she was. As I progressed and becamse the leading lady in the West End, it didn't matter if she was sitting on the front row next to Bernard Levin, as soon as the curtain would go up she would strike a match to let me know where she was. My mother and her matches - I think she went straight up there and struck a few matches for Coronation Street ."

Another Street connection is creator Tony Warren, who Amanda's known since they were young dancers in 1953. "We both had the same agent in London and would go to chorus auditions together - at Coronation Street parties, we take a trip down memory lane talking about people nobody had ever heard of."

Ask Amanda why it is that Alma has hogged the emotional spotlight in the past couple of years and she really can't tell you. "I don't know because I don't watch myself. I only watch if I am not in it. I am much more interested if someone else tells me what Alma is like."

The twists and turns of Alma's life come as much of a surprise to Amanda as to her fans. "We work week by week. I have no idea what is going to happen next week until I get my script on the Tuesday." She believes the writers deserve credit. "Our characters belong to the writers more than they ever do to us. On stage, when you get to know a play, you can redirect the writing or become you own advocate. We don't do that because it is so instant. The characters are like ordinary people in life. They adapt to circumstances.

Though Amanda comes across as a very independent person, she claims to share Alma's emotional nature. "I always say that you can't play emotional things unless you are emotional and you can't play a sense of humour scene unless you have a sense of humour. I remember the Christmas that Alma was left on her own. I had been watching something on television that morning about people who had been stranded and never got over it. When i went into the studio to do those scenes, instead of pulling back I thought 'that is how upset one gets'. You have to be as honest as possible.

The Baldwin family has recently been extended by the arrival of Mike's son Mark, something Amanda admits to finding 'quite touching really. I don't have children so I was in the same position as Alma not knowing how to cope with it."

Given all the things that she has done, are there any unfulfilled ambitions left? "Well, I would like to be in another musical before I die. I always wanted to be one of those rather eccentric ladies who sit at a piano and sing late into the night....In the meantime, I never take it for granted that I am going to be in the Street for longer than the end of my contract. I hope my character grows in the right direction so people enjoy what comes."

Alma's marriage to Mike has one compensation - a reduction in the sacks of letter that arrive for Amanda at the Granada studio. " I had a lot warnings in my fan mail, so when I got married I think everybody was surprised. " As, indeed, was Mrs Baldwin.