JUNE BROWN Discovers Tragic East-End Past!
When ‘Eastenders‘ star June Brown agreed to go on the BBC show ‘Who Do You Think You Are?‘, she didn’t realise how tragic the details of her family history would be. But she understood the hardship suffered by earlier generations of her family, as she suffered similar losses in her current life.
Brown, who plays Dot Cotton in Britain’s popular TV soap drama, is Jewish through her mother and her east-end history features on the new series of the ancestry program that begins on Wednesday (10th August, 2011).
The actress discovered that her great-great-great-great-grandmother Rachel, who lived in Holland, faced religious prejudice and was also left alone to raise four children after her husband and son left the country to find work in London. Brown, whose second daughter died 16 days after she was born, said:
“I feel an affinity with her partly because I lost one child, my mother lost two children and Rachel lost all of hers in the end”.
Rachel‘s four children all died young and she never found out what happened to her loved ones in London. Brown, 84, whose first husband committed suicide and whose second husband died in 2003, said:
“She was widowed and I’m twice widowed.”
Brown stands proud as one of the longest-running characters in ‘Eastenders‘, playing Dot for over 20 years. She previously had small roles on ITV‘s ‘Coronation Street‘, ‘Minder‘, and ‘The Bill‘.
