“The Street was in a very different place back then.”
Coronation Street veteran Jane Danson has looked back on the negative reaction she had to face when first joining the soap as Leanne Battersby.
Danson has been playing Leanne on the ITV series since 1997 when the Battersby family, dubbed the ‘family from hell’ at the time, was introduced to some criticism.
She recently opened up on receiving unkind comments from fans, with some being unable to separate their feelings for the character when meeting Danson in real life.
“The Street was in a very different place back then, with a small cast and long-established characters, then this rough family came in behaving terribly and everyone hated them,” Danson told The Mirror.
“People wrote to me all the time saying, ‘We hate you. Leave our street!’ I was just a girl from Bury who’d done a few bits of acting so as an 18-year-old that was a big shock.”
She then recalled an encounter with a Corrie viewer in which she was assaulted over the way her character acted on screen.
“One day I was out at my local shops when an old woman hit me with her handbag and told me to ‘turn that bloody music down’ because Leanne had been shaking the cobbles with her big boom box!” Danson said.
“I became too scared to leave the house and had to be careful where I went out.
“I’m not gobby like Leanne but back then, for many viewers, Coronation Street was a real place.
“Nowadays with social media like Instagram, people get to see us as actual people and not just the characters, but the attention is still pretty intense.”
Reflecting on her nearly three-decade stint on Corrie, the star expresses gratitude for having been able to play the feisty Leanne for so long.
“Leanne is gobby and strong and been through a lot which has made her resilient. She has fire in her belly which has made her fun to play,” she said.
“I never imagined what Corrie would bring and I have had some great storylines in those 26 years.”
