Angie is well known for her cheeky banter, her perm and turning to alcohol during her stormy marriage to cheating Den Watts (Leslie Grantham), which ended when he handed her divorce papers on Christmas Day 1986, in an episode watched by a record-breaking 30.1 million viewers.

Despite being the loud and feisty lady of Walford, and having a close relationship with her beloved adoptive daughter Sharon (Letitia Dean), she does not have much real happiness during her time in Albert Square.

The character of Angie was originally going to be named Pearl[1] and she, her husband and adopted daughter were to be the occupants of the soap's local pub, now famously known as The Queen Vic.

The Watts were seen by Holland as integral to the shows success, partly because he had already guessed that the pub was going to be a monstrous battleground where emotions would run high on a regular basis, and also because the occupants would be providing the majority of the drama.

[1] Angie's original character outline as written by Smith and Holland appeared in an abridged form in their book, EastEnders: The Inside Story.

In this passage, Angie will be referred to as Pearl, her husband as Jack, her daughter as Tracey and her dog as Prince (known now as Den, Sharon and Roly respectively).

Fennell was born in the East End of London and both Holland and Smith considered her to have unique qualities to her personality, which combined "vitality and vulnerability, and an almost desperate nervous energy" - all of which were perfect for Angie.

Smith had taught the actress Anita Dobson many years earlier and remembered her as "sharp, brittle, very theatrical, with a vitality that was almost intense and a range of emotions that were alarming considering her youth", but was worried she was too young for the part.

Den's clashes with Angie brought EastEnders to a peak of popularity and toppled rival soap Coronation Street from the top of the ratings chart.

Her menacing voice at the end of the telephone severely affected the mood of both Den and Angie and kept the audience on edge every time the phone rang.

Dobson had been opposed to the suicide storyline from the beginning; she fought hard to get the scripts changed, but she was eventually persuaded to play the scenes, and was applauded for a "brilliant performance".

The climax was a trip to Venice when Angie, convinced that Den had finished with his mistress, was taken there for a second-honeymoon, returning to London on the Orient Express.

Their photographs appeared in British newspapers, thus ruining the shock surprise that Tony Holland had created, by including Den's mistress in the episode.

[6] The character of Angie Watts was subsequently killed off-screen in 2002 (dying of a drink related illness) and brought home to be buried by her on-screen daughter Sharon in order to facilitate the return of the actress Letitia Dean.

She said "[Angie] could be on the floor, drunk, weeping buckets, mascara everywhere, then drag herself up the next morning in that old blue dressing gown, tidy herself up and be in the bar that night telling jokes and looking a million dollars.

Alcoholic Angie shares a stormy marriage with her womanising husband, Den Watts (Leslie Grantham), and refuses to let him go even during their rockiest times.

Angie is good at putting on a front for the customers, dressing to kill, screeching outrageously with the girls, but inside she is crippled with depression.

Lofty Holloway (Tom Watt), Simon Wicks (Nick Berry) and even Arthur Fowler (Bill Treacher) are all subject to Angie's not-so-subtle flirting, but her only successful conquest is local builder, Tony Carpenter (Oscar James).

Although Angie tries to stop drinking, her attempts always fail dismally and by the end of the year, she is arrested for drink-driving when she crashes Den's car on the way home from a darts match.

Upon recovering, Angie decides to play Den at his own game and so she begins another affair, this time with Andy O'Brien (Ross Davidson).

Thinking that her marriage is safe, Angie is happier than ever - until Den informs her that he overheard her conversation with the barman, and he then serves her divorce papers as a Christmas present.

In response, Angie and Sharon pack their bags and walk out of the pub, choosing to take the route through the public area to cause Den the most embarrassment possible.

The Queen Vic is floundering without Angie, a fact that she seems to delight over, and the sheer pleasure of watching Den suffer is all she needs to make her "grin and bear" The Dagmar's yuppie clientele.

By the end of the year, Angie finally loses her patience with The Dagmar clientele, and after punching one of the customers in the face, she leaves town for a couple of days.

Upon her return, she is in great pain, but hides it and marches over to The Queen Vic during the New Year's Eve celebrations and offers to come back to work, but only as Den's business partner and not his wife.

After the funeral ceremony, Sharon confides in Angie's closest surviving friends, Pauline Fowler (Wendy Richard) and Pat Evans (Pam St Clement), that years of heavy drinking finally caught up with Angie and she died a slow painful decline due to cirrhosis of the liver, having also experienced alcohol-related dementia.

Despite having remarried, Angie had requested to be buried next to Den, which Sharon does for her when she returns the body to London in order to reunite her two deceased parents.

Fourteen years after Den's disappearance, it is revealed that he had not died after all, but had faked his own death in order to escape the gangsters who had been employed to kill him.

[12] In 2020, Sara Wallis and Ian Hyland from The Daily Mirror placed Angie 25th on their ranked list of the Best EastEnders characters of all time, calling her a "Permed pub landlady" who "spent three years in Walford battling alcoholism and her feckless husband Den.