A stand out episode from January 1984 featuring Marie saw her brawling in the middle of Brookside Close with neighbour, Sheila Grant, played by Sue Johnston.
Both Marie and Sheila had to be pulled apart by their respective husbands, while the upper middle-class Collins family drove through the middle of it all in their brand new Austin Maestro.
The scene has since been praised for effectively characterising the class caste of the British suburbs in the 1980s, where Thatcherite home ownership policies significantly changed demographics, so that those on the way up the property ladder can now just as easily find themselves living next door to those on the way down.
Writers then involved the Jackson family in a long-running social injustice storyline during mid to late 1984, which saw Marie's husband, George, played by Cliff Howells, wrongly convicted of armed robbery.
[1][2] Ian Brandes from The Sunday People reported that Phil Redmond originally tried to convince Howells and Keaveney to remain in Brookside for at least another year because of their popularity, but this proved unachievable due to the dispute with producers.