Mavis to become a shrew?

Press, 1 March 1989, Page 19

Mavis to become a shrew?

From

GILLIAN WAINWRIGHT

in Britain

“Coronation Street’s” Mavis Riley, or Wilton as she is following her wedding to wimpish mother’s boy Derek Wilton, is about to change from a mouse into a shrew. That’s the view of actress Thelma Barlow, who plays Mavis. “I think it’s a likely way for her to go,” Barlow says. She adds that although the cast have no direct say in the script or story lines, they have an indirect influence by the way they play the characters. The writers may then see something they can use.

“I think Mavis will make Derek a good wife, but marriage will change her quite a lot,” Barlow forecasts. "She’ll become the driving force. She’s very determined and will

be quite tough with Derek. There’s a danger that she could become quite shrewish. It comes from having had to make her own decisions in life and she is too set in her

ways to change.”

Thelma Barlow is a classically trained actress who decided to give acting a try after eight years as a secretary in Huddersfield. “I was as green as a cabbage, but it was an easy decision to make,” she recalled. After the failure of her own marriage her two sons Clive and James are the only men in her life.

Barlow left the cast last year to do a play at the Bristol Old Vic. “It was lovely to do. It was 16 years since I was in the theatre. It was smashing to do and I think it’s good for the programme too,” she says. It was at the Bristol Old Vic in 1976 that Thelma first met Peter Baldwin who plays Derek. Baldwin’s wife, the actress Sarah Long, died of cancer. His 20-year-old daughter Julia has now

followed her parents into acting. Baldwin has a shop in London’s Covent Garden and spends his week days in Manchester recording “Coronation Street.”

He collects old toy theatres. “The passion started when I was a boy,” he says. “I was given a toy theatre when I was 12. I’m never sure whether it was that that drove me into the real theatre or whether the real theatre led me to collecting.”

The cardboard theatres were used by children in the mid-nineteenth century. “It was a great toy. Sometimes the whole family would put on a performance. It’s a wonderful ego trip for an actor. You play all the parts, you take the scenery up and down, do the lighting, in fact you do everything.”