North London Food & Culture

Life Tips #9: Anna Wing, actor

'You still like to be fancied - even at 90.' The former Eastenders actor tells us what she's learnt

1. Your mother is your best friend, but you only learn that when you’ve lost her. Mine committed suicide when I was 21. The day my father told me, I went home and searched her wardrobe for her clothes, because she always had a wonderful smell about her. I thought I’d been abandoned and it made me terribly insecure – you don’t think of the pain of the person who’s done it till much later. Eventually I decided it was an act of heroism: my mother she had angina and had experienced two strokes. She didn’t want to be a nuisance.

2. It’s soul stuff, the violin. I’m never without music. I used to have a beautiful great big Steinway piano here, and I like all instruments, but the one I need most is a violin: I love the high notes, I love the weepiness.

3. You don’t make many friends after a certain age: the greatest are those made between 20 and 30, then it’s romantic relationships, followed by broken hearts, and in the final lap you pine for years, but still like to be fancied – even at 90.


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4. It was hard working a 70 hour week for 4 years. Lou Beale was an awful old bag, like no other job I’ve ever done. I’m still stopped, 20 years later; they shout ‘Lou’ and kiss me, grope me. It was such a voice.

5. We don’t hear enough about the kind people; we hear about the villains. My neighbour upstairs said, ‘you’ve always got draughts down here’, so she made me two ‘roly-poly’ doorsteps, and they’re of sentimental value now she’s got a slightly disabled hand. They represent the kindness of the human race.

6. Be a pacifist. I’ve been one forever – I’ve marched, I’ve protested. When war broke in 1939 out I enrolled as a Red Cross nurse.

7. My wedding was the happiest day of my life. Yet I divorced my husband Peter on the grounds of infidelity, although in retrospect I behaved rather badly as I was so vain. The stupidity of youth! Then I was with the poet Philip O’ Connor for 7 years, but haven’t got anything to remember him by, except the last note he scribbled in 1960: ‘I love you, the gist of it is, I’ve been unfaithful. Have packed and gone.’ I pined for him for 15 years.

Stephen Emms interviewed longterm Camden borough resident Anna Wing, then aged 93, in 2007 for The Guardian’s G2 section.


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