Death
A 60-a-day smoker, Phoenix was found to have lung cancer in March 1986 after collapsing at home. Following her diagnosis she continued to work, hiding her illness from most people, including long term partner Antony Booth. In the summer of 1986 her condition deteriorated, forcing her to undergo more extensive treatment and confirming mild speculation in the press that she had health problems. It later leaked out that she had just weeks to live and had been given the Last Rites. On her deathbed she married Booth in Stockport, on 10 September 1986, attracting wide-scale media attention. Eight days later she died in her sleep, aged 62.
At her request, her funeral service at the Holy Name Church in Manchester featured a large brass band; according to Coronation Street histories written by show historian Daran Little, she wished the event that marked her death to be as lively as her life. Tony Blair and Phoenix's stepdaughter Cherie Blair were among the mourners.
Since her death, Phoenix has been portrayed by Denise Black, Sue Johnston and Jessie Wallace in various dramas depicting her life.
Read more about this topic: Pat Phoenix
Famous quotes containing the word death:
“What we think of as our sensitivity is only the higher evolution of terror in a poor dumb beast. We suffer for nothing. Our own death wish is our only real tragedy.”
—Mario Puzo (b. 1920)
“In the twentieth century, death terrifies men less than the absence of real life. All these dead, mechanized, specialized actions, stealing a little bit of life a thousand times a day until the mind and body are exhausted, until that death which is not the end of life but the final saturation with absence.”
—Raoul Vaneigem (b. 1934)
“The ancients adorned their sarcophagi with the emblems of life and procreation, and even with obscene symbols; in the religions of antiquity the sacred and the obscene often lay very close together. These men knew how to pay homage to death. For death is worthy of homage as the cradle of life, as the womb of palingenesis.”
—Thomas Mann (1875–1955)