EastEnders icon Anita Dobson is best known for her role as Angie Watts, the first landlady of The Queen Vic, when the BBC soap debuted 40 years ago. Anita, 75, portrayed the emotionally exhausted and battling alcoholic Angie from 1985 to 1988, but has always remained a symbol of the BBC programme. With Angie behind the bar, there was never a dull moment, especially with her deceiving her husband Den Watts (Leslie Grantham) and being the loving adoptive parents to Sharon (Letitia Dean). In a bid to break up Den and his high-class mistress Jan, Angie lied to Den that she was terminally ill and tragically had six months left to live. Showing an unusual sense of honour, Dirty Den temporarily ended things with Jan and vowed to spend Angie’s final months with her. However, Angie’s lie was dramatically revealed during a journey on the Orient Express, leading to one of the show’s most memorable moments. To this day, the EastEnders episode where unfaithful Dirty Den serves Angie divorce papers on Christmas Day 1986 remains the most viewed soap episode ever. Angie left Walford in 1988 to join her lover, Sonny, in Spain.
Away from Walford, actress Anita fell in love with rock star Brian May
(Image: BBC)
She later relocated to Miami and remarried. Ultimately, it was her drinking, not Den, that led to her downfall, as Angie died of cirrhosis of the liver in 2002, reports Plymouth Live. Away from Walford, actress Anita fell in love with rock star Brian May and the pair are still living in wedded bliss. Love blossomed for Brian and Anita and they tied the knot in a small register office ceremony in Richmond upon Thames, London, in 2000. Reminiscing about her first encounter with Brian, Anita shared her memories with the Daily Mail, saying: “He invited me to see Queen play at Wembley, with some friends. Meeting my husband opened a door to a world I’d hitherto only dreamed of. Here was a man who was a god globally.” Following their nuptials, the couple celebrated their union in Venice, a city that stole their hearts so much they make it a ritual to return annually. Fast forward to 2020, and Anita’s quick thinking proved pivotal when Brian suffered a heart attack. She explained to The Daily Mail how she initially mistook Brian’s life-threatening situation for fatigue due to excessive exercise, stating: “He said, ‘Babe, I think I’m having a heart attack’, I said ‘No, you’ve been exercising and you’ve overdone it’.”
EastEnders icon Anita Dobson is best known for her role as Angie Watts
(Image: Getty Images)
The Queen guitarist, who was in the midst of recovering from a gardening accident involving a torn muscle and pinched nerve, opened up on BBC Morning Live about his health ordeal: “She did save my life. I had this whole cluster of things go wrong. It was a good job it was lockdown in a way but I was incapacitated with the heart attack, complications from the drugs, then I had sciatica so badly. I couldn’t even crawl. “‘So when you get that bad, you’re just grateful to be alive at the end of it and its thanks to Anita that I am, she’s been there the whole way through it. She’s taken care of me and nursed me and whatever.” Beyond the confines of Albert Square, Anita has a long list of TV credits to her name, including stints on Dangerfield, Ghosts, Sunburn, Hotel Babylon, Holby City, The Bill, Call the Midwife and The Rebel on Gold. Her stage career is equally impressive, with roles in musicals like Chorus Girls, Chicago, The Merry Wives of Windsor and Wicked, not to mention her twirl on Strictly Come Dancing in 2011.
Beyond the confines of Albert Square, Anita has a long list of TV credits to her name
(Image: GETTY)
More recently, she played Eunice Lytton in Father Brown (2025), and last year alone saw her as Janine in Generation Z (2024), Janet in Curfew (2024), Mrs Flood in Doctor Who, and Mrs. Mentis in the film This Time Next Year. After a whopping 37 years, Anita has made her return to the EastEnders set for the soap’s 40th anniversary, reuniting with Letitia Dean, who plays her on-screen daughter Sharon Watts. Anita and Letitia will feature in Ross Kemp’s one-off documentary celebrating the milestone. EastEnders: 40 Years on The Square airs on Monday (February 17) at 8pm on BBC One, revisiting some of Walford’s most memorable moments and groundbreaking storylines from the past four decades. EastEnders airs Monday to Thursday at 7.30pm on BBC One and iPlayer
