Gretchen Franklin: 90 Years Young


By Larry Jaffee


Gretchen Franklin, whom EastEnders fans will always cherish as 'Ethel,' celebrates her 90th birthday this 7 July. A visit this spring with Gretchen, the British Gran I never had and who bears a striking resemblance to my real grandmother on my mother’s side (who died in the early 1990s), found her as sharp as ever.

This was the fourth time that we met in person at her home. As usual, we had loads to talk about, and I learned all kinds of things about her that I didn’t know before.

For example, she told me that her husband, Caswell Garth, was a writer of short stories for newspapers and plays-comedies and musical comedies, and that he died of brain cancer when he was 50 years old. She never married again, but she winks that she certainly had a few chances.

Part of the reason we had loads to talk about was that Gretchen last fall had returned to Albert Square. Her appearances on EastEnders for the past decade had become a lot more infrequent.

It had been some time since Ethel had been at the centre of any plots, and when she did return to the Square from her 'home for the aged,' it was usually for a special occasion like a wedding or funeral to add a few witty lines while having a drink with old mates like 'Dot' and 'Pauline' in the Queen Vic.

But current executive producer John Yorke had talked her into coming back for a significant storyline.

Don’t worry, I won’t spoil it for us stateside public TV viewers and divulge the story, only to say that it involved 'Dot' and was a great reprise of the two-hander the two actresses enjoyed nearly 14 years before-aired in the U.K. on 2 July 1987. Colin Brake, author of the BBC-published 10th anniversary EastEnders, selected the earlier episode as his pick of the year for 1987: 'a beautifully written miniplay about nostalgia and growing old.'

Of Gretchen’s most recent return, she told me that it involved five weeks of work and that the experience was 'very satisfactory from both a personal and professional perspective.' She had special kind words for Yorke, and also June Brown, with whom she had enjoyed so many terrific scenes over the years.

Upon finishing her scenes, the EastEnders production team presented Gretchen with a glass vase. That reminded her of a gift that the series presented to the castmembers when the show was first starting: an EastEnders shirt, which Gretchen thought was cheap-looking. 'Anna Wing (who played ‘Lou Beale’) asked me what I was going to do with mine. I told her I couldn’t think what it was good for.' Anna Wing replied, laughingly: 'Around the house.'

Our conversation moved to Martine McCutcheon ('Tiffany') in My Fair Lady. Gretchen noted that when Julie Andrews played 'Eliza Doolittle' in the West End in the late 1950s, Gretchen was starring in an Agatha Christie play in an adjacent theatre. 'Our show was a bomb. We used to enviously look out the window at the long lines [for My Fair Lady].'

Gretchen said she wasn’t surprised that McCutcheon ended up landing such a role because there was an occasion on EastEnders when she had the opportunity to sing, and Gretchen thought she had a nice voice.




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