Violet Helen Carson, OBE (1 September 1898 – 26 December 1983) was a British actress of radio, stage and television, and a singer and pianist, who had a long and celebrated career as an actress and performer during the early days of BBC Radio, and during the last two decades of her life as the matronly Christian widow, town gossip and elderly battle-axe Ena Sharples in the ITV television soap opera Coronation Street. She was one of the original characters from the series debut in 1960 and would feature in the role for twenty years. Early life and career Carson was born on German Street in Ancoats, Manchester. Her Scottish father, William Brown Carson, ran a flour mill and her mother, Mary Clarke Carson ( Tordoff), was an amateur singer. As a child, she took piano lessons while attending a Church of England school and performed with her younger sister Nellie as a singing act called the Carson Sisters. In 1913, she became a cinema pianist providing the musical accompaniment for silent films. As silent films fell out of fashion following the arrival of "talkies", Carson took up singing. She married road contractor George Peploe on 1 September 1926, her 28th birthday. Peploe died in 1929 at the age of 31. They had no children and Carson never remarried. The premature death of Peploe mirrored the early life of Carson's iconic character Ena Sharples many years later; in the years long before the show was created, Ena's fiancé had died in World War I, and her husband died prematurely in 1937. Radio and theatre career In 1935, Carson joined BBC Radio in Manchester, singing a range of material from comic musical hall style songs to light operatic arias. She began in a show called Songs at the Piano and was a regular member of Children's Hour on the BBC Home Service and was the star of Nursery Sing Song from Manchester, in which she frequently sang with producer Trevor Hill, many years her junior. Contrary to popular opinion, she was never known as "Auntie Vi", that epithet belonging only to Violet Fraser in the 1920s. "I was never anyone's aunt," Carson exclaimed when Hill produced a BBC Radio programme about her in 1981. She worked with the Council for the Encouragement of Music and the Arts during the Second World War and was for six years the pianist for the