Violet Carson
| Violet Carson OBE | |
|---|---|
Carson as Ena Sharples in Coronation Street
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|
| Born |
Violet Helen Carson 1 September 1898 Manchester, Lancashire, England |
| Died | 26 December 1983 (aged 85) Blackpool, Lancashire, England |
| Occupation | Actress, singer |
| Years active | 1920–1980 |
| Spouse(s) | George Peploe (m. 1926–28) (his death) |
| Relatives | Nellie Carson (sister) |
Violet Helen Carson, OBE (1 September 1898 – 26 December 1983) was a British actress of radio and television, and a singer and pianist, who had a long and celebrated career as an actress and performer during the early days of BBC radio, and during the latter decades of her life as the matronly gossip and battle-axe Ena Sharples in the ITV television soap opera Coronation Street.
Carson was born on German Street in Ancoats, Manchester. Her father ran a flour mill and her mother was an amateur singer. As a child, she took piano lessons while attending Church of England school, Carson performed with her younger sister Nellie as a singing act called the Carson Sisters. She then became a cinema pianist providing the musical accompaniment for silent films.
She married the cricketer George Peploe in 1926, but he died just two years later, aged only 31. They had no children. Violet Carson never re-married. The premature death of Peploe would ironically mirror the early life of Carson's iconic character Ena Sharples many years later; in the years long before the show was created, Carson's fiancée had died in the Great War, and her husband died prematurely in 1937.
In 1935 Carson joined BBC Radio in Manchester, singing a range of material from comic musical hall style songs to light operatic arias. She began in a show called Songs at the Piano and was a regular member of Children's Hour on the BBC Home Service and was the star of Nursery Sing Song from Manchester, in which she frequently sang with producer Trevor Hill, many years her junior. Contrary to popular opinion she was never known as Auntie Vi, that epithet belonging only to Violet Fraser back in the 1920s. "I was never anyone's aunt" exclaimed Carson when Hill produced a BBC Radio programme about her in 1981. She worked with the Council for the Encouragement of Music and the Arts during the Second World War and was for six years the pianist for the Mabel and Wilfred Pickles radio show Have A Go. Her extensive radio career included a period as a presenter and interviewer on Woman's Hour for five years and she acted in numerous radio dramas. On stage her curriculum vitae included playing the Duchess of York in William Shakespeare's tragedy Richard III.
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