It was her role as Ethel Skinner in EastEnders that made Franklin a household name at the age of 73.
EastEnders creators Julia Smith and Tony Holland spent a long time trawling around pubs and street markets in the East End of London, soaking up the atmosphere and making mental notes for when they were to actually create the characters for their show. Smith was very taken with an elderly lady, with ill-fitting false teeth and a face "...made up to rival a neon sign...". Clutching a Yorkshire Terrier dog in one hand and a glass of Guinness in the other, she was the life and soul of the party; Julia saw that there was much comic mileage to be gained from such a character, and as a result Ethel Mae Skinner was born.
Ethel was a firm favourite from the start of the soap's run. She was a gossip who did not always get her facts right and this was often used to comic effect, as was her use of malapropisms. However, when Julia Smith announced that the character of Ethel was to go into an old people's home, Franklin, in her own words "resigned on the spot". "I didn't want Ethel becoming a sad old dear who the others visited occasionally." She did make return visits to the series, but her bitterness at being, in her words "superannuated" never really left her.
Franklin's character owned a dog, a pug named Willy (the writers had intended it to be a Yorkshire terrier but a suitable canine could be found) and a lot of rather puerile humour was derived from his name, her famous lines being either: "Where's my Willy?" or, in a double entendre "Has anyone seen my Willy?"
Franklin's character departed in 1997 when it was revealed that she had left Walford to live in a retirement village. She returned in July 2000, but was killed off from the show on 7 September 2000, at the age of 86 in a controversial euthanasia storyline. Ethel had learned that she was terminally ill, and asked Dot Cotton (June Brown) to assist her in taking her own life by an overdose of her morphine tablets.
Franklin retired from acting on her departure from EastEnders.
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