Birth and Early Life
She was born in Steeton, West Yorkshire in 1926. After failing her 11+ exam she studied at the local elementary school, leaving in July 1940, a month before her 14th birthday, to work alongside her mother as a weaver in a woollen mill.
Heathcote worked there for five years and expected to stay there for the rest of her working life, but at the behest of her fellow workers, the mill boss, Charlie Fletcher, sponsored her to go and study drama at the Northern Theatre School in Bradford under the guidance of Esme Church. Famously Fletcher told her, as she left, that if it didn't work out there would always be three looms waiting for her at his mill.
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