Roberta Taylor

Husky-voiced East London-born actress Roberta Taylor came to fame on television as Hills family matriarch Irene Raymond on the popular soap EastEnders (1985) and as the indomitable, hard-drinking, yet very human Inspector Gina Gold, presiding over Sun Hill's uniformed police in The Bill (1984) from 2002 to 2008.

The actress was born out of wedlock to bus conductors Robert Alexander Archer and Winifred Roberts. Her father had a wife elsewhere and soon skedaddled. Roberta (nicknamed 'Robbie') was brought up by her mother, a formidable grandmother and several aunts (in 2005, she detailed her childhood in a memoir entitled 'Too Many Mothers'). Roberta initially trained as a dental nurse while studying drama at Toynbee Hall in Whitechapel. In 1966, she married Victor Taylor, a rope maker. The union ended in divorce nine years later.

On the advice of a friend, Roberta enrolled at the Central School of Speech and Drama on the same day her future second husband, the actor Peter Guinness, also auditioned. Upon her graduation in 1976, she began a lengthy association with the Citizen's Theatre in Glasgow, acting in plays by Brecht (making her stage debut in The Seven Deadly Sins), Proust, Coward, Lermontov and Wilde. She also performed with the Royal Shakespeare Company, the Royal Exchange in Manchester and at the West End. A return to the Citizen's in 2014 saw her in a revival of Hamlet as Gertrude, opposite Guinness (to whom she had been married since 1996) as Claudius. They also appeared together in The Bill in 2007, with Guinness in the part of married barrister Peter Harris with whom Roberta's Gina Gold has a brief affair.

Following her screen debut in 1979, Roberta's resume of guest appearances included, among others, episodes of Minder (1979), Father Brown (2013), Silent Witness (1996) and Luther (2010). She played the imperious and dogmatic philanthropist Mrs Pardiggle in BBC's superb adaptation of Bleak House (2005) and was last seen on TV as costume shop owner Gloria Fonteyn in several episodes of Shakespeare & Hathaway: Private Investigators (2018).

In November 2008, she published 'The Reinvention of Ivy Brown', a novel, set in London in 1963. It was followed in August 2023 by a volume of poems, titled 'Where I Am From'. Roberta Alexandra Mary Taylor died of pneumonia in the aftermath of a fall, on July 6 2024, aged 76.