Corrie icon Amanda Barrie ‘thought she’d be stoned’ when she came out bi
Amanda Barrie (Getty Images)
Bisexual actress Amanda Barrie has shared her fears about coming out in a candid new interview, revealing that she was worried it would destroy her career.
The 90-year-old Coronation Street and Carry On star discussed her experience with Richard Madeley and Kate Garraway during a 25 June appearance on Good Morning Britain.
Barrie came out in her 2002 memoir It’s Not A Rehearsal when she was 67 years old.
When Madeley asked Barrie if she thought perhaps she would be alright if she came out earlier in her career, Barrie said: “Oh, no, I don’t think it would have been all right. Not for a minute. Not then… A lot has happened in the last 25 years, and you forget you’re living in a completely different time warp.”
She went on to share that she believed the reaction would have been more muted than “a real saga”.
“It would have just been odd people saying, ‘Well, I’m not going to work with that. No, I can’t do a scene.’ It would have been like that, and it would have happened.”
Barrie also reminisced about the “big moment” in her life when she came out on Richard & Judy in 2002. “Whenever I say it, everybody laughs and I go, it was a very serious moment in my life,” she said.
On her decision to come out at that time, she said: “I just felt so dishonest, and I felt as if I was sort of cheating in some way, although all my friends, family, anybody, have always known what I was doing, which has been varied over the years, I give you that.
“I couldn’t be honest or look somebody in the eye. You don’t really know me because you don’t know me,” she continued.
‘I got more of a hug than a stone thrown at me’
When asked about the reaction she received at the time, Barrie laughed, and said: “I thought that day when I came to you and Judy, I thought I should be stoned in the street. People will actually refuse to put me in a taxi. I should be barred from Tesco. I just thought something ghastly would happen.”
“And what did happen?” asked Madeley.
“Nothing!” Barrie laughed. “Absolutely nothing! In fact, I got more of a hug than a stone thrown at me.”
Barrie then went on to talk about how the world has changed since she came out. “I think the world has always changed, hasn’t it, really? I mean, you couldn’t do the ‘Carry On’ films now. I mean, you couldn’t do them. They wouldn’t be acceptable.”
She continued: “People often say to me, ‘Coronation Street has changed,’ and you go, ‘Well, yes, Coronation Street has changed because Manchester has changed… Everything changes, darling, or else you’d be wearing chainmail or something.’”
Barrie was in a relationship with singer Billy Fury in the mid-1960s, having met while filming I’ve Gotta Horse. He proposed to her, but she did not accept. In 1967, she married actor and director Robin Hunter, but the pair separated in the 80s, and Hunter later died in 2004.
Following her coming out, Barrie started dating crime novelist Hilary Bonner. The pair married in 2014 and have been together ever since.
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