Charlie Cotton
Charles "Charlie" Cotton, played by Christopher Hancock, is a recurring character, introduced in March 1986 as the estranged husband of Dot Cotton (June Brown). He appears in stints until producers made the decision to kill the character off-screen in 1991, to aid development of characters connected to him. June Brown was openly against the killing of Charlie. Charlie appears one last time, in October 2000, as an apparition, warning his son Nick to change his ways. Charlie comes and goes throughout his duration in the show; he is first seen 13 months after the soap's launch in 1986. Depicted as bigamous and a conman, Charlie typically reappears in the show whenever he needs money or temporary accommodation and, because of Dot's Christian ideals regarding forgiveness, Charlie always is permitted to return. According to Christopher Hancock, Charlie is "a truly revolting character, a loser" and the character has been described as a "despicable small-time villain lazy and pathetic". Author Kate Lock has described Charlie as a "sly, shifty, weaselly man". In order to become the character of Charlie, Hancock wore stick on sideburns.
Read more about this topic: List Of East Enders Characters (1986)
Famous quotes containing the words charlie and/or cotton:
“We [actors] are indeed a strange lot! There are times we doubt that we have any emotions we can honestly call our own. I have approached every dynamic scene change in my life the same way. When I married Charlie MacArthur, I sat down and wondered how I could play the best wife that ever was.... My love for him was the truest thing in my life; but it was still important that I love him with proper effect, that I act loving him with great style, that I achieve the ultimate in wifedom.”
—Helen Hayes (1900–1993)
“We are constituted a good deal like chickens, which, taken from the hen, and put in a basket of cotton in the chimney-corner, will often peep till they die, nevertheless; but if you put in a book, or anything heavy, which will press down the cotton, and feel like the hen, they go to sleep directly.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)