Elizabeth Mary Driver, (20 May 1920 – 15 October 2011) was a British actress and singer, best known for her role as Betty Williams in the long-running ITV soap opera, Coronation Street, a role she played for 42 years from 1969 to 2011, appearing in 2732 episodes. She had previously appeared as Mrs Edgley in Coronation Street spin-off Pardon the Expression (1965–1966) opposite Arthur Lowe. In her early career she was a singer, appearing in musical films such as Boots! Boots! (1934), opposite George Formby, and in Penny Paradise (1938), directed by Carol Reed. She was made an MBE in the 2000 New Year Honours. Early life Betty Driver was born in 1920 at the Prebend Nursing Home, Leicester, the elder of two daughters of Frederick and Nellie Driver. She weighed 5.5 kg (12 lb). Her father had fought in the trenches during the First World War and later became a policeman. However, Driver described her mother as "the driving force" in her life. She commented: "the only way I can explain her behaviour is that she wanted to live out her ambitions through me." The family moved to West Didsbury, Manchester, in 1922, where they lived in a semi-detached house with other police families as neighbours. Driver went to school at Wilbraham Road and was later joined there by her younger sister Freda, who shared a class with a young Patricia Manfield—later known as Pat Phoenix, the actress who went on to play the role of Elsie Tanner in Coronation Street. Driver described her parents as absent of affection, stating that they never celebrated birthdays and rarely gave her toys and gifts. Though she maintained her father never beat them, their mother "more often lashed out". Driver's mother had never wanted children, and developed an interest in her daughter only when she discovered she had a talent for singing. When she was aged seven, the Drivers went to see a production called the Quaintesques, a group of men dressed as women, when the star, Billy Manders, asked the audience to join in with a chorus. Driver's singing stood out so much that Manders asked her to come forward and sing with him. From then on, Driver's mother began taking her to talent contests in Manchester, and she won them all. She commented, "I imitated hits by Gracie Fields such as 'Sing As We Go', and 'The Biggest Aspidistra in