Amanda Barrie says she feared she would be sacked from Corrie over her sexuality

Former Coronation Street star Amanda Barrie has said she thought TV executives on the ITV soap would have “sacked” her if she came out while she was on the show.

The actress, who will turn 90 later this week, joined Coronation Street in 1981 where she played Alma Sedgewick on and off for 20 years until 2001.

The actress, who has been married to novelist Hilary Bonner for nearly 10 years, came out publicly as bisexual in her 2002 autobiography, It’s Not A Rehearsal: The Autobiography.

Speaking on ITV’s This Morning about her fears about coming out, Barrie said: “You couldn’t. You couldn’t. And for men, it was even worse.

“There isn’t a word that you can use, an analogy, to say, ‘that’s what it’s like’.

“In Corrie, what happened was, I’d only been in it about a week and a half, and somebody shopped me to the press, somebody I should have known better.

“But I never kept my life from anybody. All my friends saw everything. Everybody knew everything.

“I think people thought it was catching, if you dealt with anybody who happened to be not quite straight down the middle, that we might catch that. But you were sort of pushed away, really, and whispered about it.”

The TV star added that she thinks TV executives would not have wanted her on the show if they knew about her sexuality.

She said: “They would not, I swear to God. And I know I said this and I can’t back it up. I know that I would have been sacked from Coronation Street, they would have got rid (of me)… it would have been a general ‘we don’t want anything to do with that’.”

Barrie described the reaction when she came out, adding that she initially thought she was going to be “stoned in the streets”.

She said: “I got a lot of hugs, actually, and it was never mentioned, never brought up, just taken, accepted.”

Barrie is also known for starring in two of the famous 1960s Carry On films: Carry On Cabby and Carry On Cleo, and appeared in Celebrity Big Brother in 2018,

The actress published her new memoir, I’m Still Here: My 90 Years, on Thursday.