Doris Speed (3 February 1899 – 16 November 1994) was an English actress, best known for her role as landlady of the Rovers Return Inn, Annie Walker, on the British television soap opera Coronation Street.
[1][2] As a child, she toured with her parents George, a singer and Ada (née Worsley) Speed, an actress, moving to different schools almost every week.
Two years later, she made her acting debut as the velvet-suited infant Prince of Rome in a Victorian melodrama, called The Royal Divorce.
[3] Speed took a course in shorthand and typing at a local technical college in 1915, and shortly after finishing it, took a job with Guinness in Manchester to support her parents' stage careers.
Appearing in The Unnamed Society's 1949 production of Hamlet, the paper's reviewer noted that Speed "acted splendidly" playing the Queen.
On stage, she performed a number of Shakespearean parts, led the chorus of women in Murder in the Cathedral, played Mrs Sullen in The Beaux' Stratagem, the mother in The Lady's Not For Burning and in Amphitryon 38 by Jean Giraudoux, appeared as the Greek beauty Leda.
Speed was in two television plays, The Myth Makers and Vital Statistics, in addition to the 1959 Hammer Studios Stanley Baker vehicle Hell Is a City, set in her native Manchester.
According to The Daily Telegraph, "Annie Walker struck a chord in the national psyche, as the embodiment of the genteel social climber, an icon of the proud petit-bourgeois tidiness which was subject to such virulent cultural attack in the 1960s."
Helped on stage by the host, Cilla Black, Speed was given a standing ovation from the Coronation Street cast present.
[3] Speed's final television appearance was an interview given with actor Ken Farrington, who played her on-screen son Billy, in 1993.
"[13] Upon her death, Coronation Street writer Leslie Duxbury wrote, "Annie Walker was not a lady to be trifled with and neither was Doris Speed," adding that the actress "looked at the world through a wry eye and expressed what she saw with a sharp wit."
"[3] Speed was said to have never forgotten the hardships of her childhood, and after a "lifetime of thrift", the success of Coronation Street enabled her to take holidays abroad.
Granada Television said in a statement: "Because of Doris Speed's wonderful performance, the character of Annie Walker became one of the legends of Coronation Street and British TV.
"[14] Her funeral took place on 23 November 1994 at the New Jerusalem Church in Kearsley, Bolton, and was attended by fellow Coronation Street stars, including Jean Alexander, Betty Driver, Julie Goodyear (Bet Lynch), Daphne Oxenford (Esther Hayes) and Irene Sutcliffe (Maggie Clegg).
[18] ITV's tribute programme in the month of her death attracted an audience of 10.11m viewers, which was a higher figure than that week's episode of Blind Date, a flagship Saturday night game show on the same network.
[20][21][22] Speed is commemorated by two plaques in her native Manchester: one outside Granada Studios, where she filmed most of her work as Annie Walker, and another at 13 Sibson Road, Chorlton-cum-Hardy, her home for many years.