EastEnders actors who have died: remembering losses that reach back to the original 1985 cast

EastEnders has been on air since 19 February 1985, which makes it old enough to have a history of grief entirely its own. A show that turned killing off characters into a national sport has also, over 40-odd years, lost a genuinely heartbreaking number of the people who played them. And if you grew up with the duff-duffs, some of these still sting.

The class of 1985

The original cast walked so everyone else's misery could run. Here's who we've lost from that first, foundational Walford:

• Wendy Richard (Pauline Fowler) — died in February 2009, aged 65. The cardigan, the laundrette, the ability to look personally betrayed by the entire borough. Iconic behaviour, all of it.
• Bill Treacher (Arthur Fowler) — died in November 2022, aged 92, one of the very first actors cast on the show. He played Pauline's put-upon husband from 1985 to 1996, and his breakdown storyline remains some of the bleakest, best acting the soap ever aired.
• June Brown (Dot Cotton) — died in April 2022, aged 95. She arrived a few months into 1985 and stayed, on and off, for 35 years of scripture, fags and launderette gossip.
• Leslie Grantham (Den Watts) — died in June 2018, aged 71. Dirty Den served Angie those divorce papers on Christmas Day 1986 in front of 30 million people, and Christmas telly never recovered.
• Anna Wing (Lou Beale) — died in 2013, aged 98, having played the original matriarch of the whole Beale-Fowler operation.
• Gretchen Franklin (Ethel Skinner) — died in 2005, aged 94. Ethel and her little Willy (the pug, behave) were the square's comic heart.
• Ross Davidson (Andy O'Brien) — died in 2006. His character holds the grim honour of being the first EastEnder ever killed off, hit by a lorry in 1986. The show was warming up.
• Sandy Ratcliff (Sue Osman) — died in April 2019, aged 70. She ran the caff from 1985 to 1989 and carried some of the soap's earliest, hardest storylines.

How Walford said goodbye

When Treacher died, tributes poured in from the BBC and his old castmates, and his family's statement said it plainly:

"Bill was a brilliant actor and a wonderful husband and father."

June Brown's death brought out half of British showbiz, with Stephen Fry remembering her as "a tireless and fearless LGBT ally" — because Dot Cotton's real-life counterpart was, it turns out, considerably cooler than most of us.

The losses kept coming after 1985, too

The original cast isn't the whole story. John Bardon, who played Jim Branning from 1996, died in 2014, and the show quietly killed Jim off-screen not long after — Walford's version of lowering the flag. It's become a pattern: when an actor dies, the square mourns twice, once in the papers and once on screen.

Forty years in, EastEnders isn't just a soap with a body count. It's a show old enough to bury its own family.

Which, for a programme about family, feels horribly fitting.