Mary to return to Stockport with him for a family Christmas. She refuses, but on Christmas Eve, after getting extremely drunk, Chris snatches baby Annie and attempts to drive her back to Stockport with him, only to crash his car into a garden wall before he can leave. Annie survives, but Mary finds it hard to forgive her father for his near-fatal mistake. In 1988, Mary and Rod begin to go through some problems, which eventually lead to them splitting up. Mary begins to behave erratically again, regularly taking drugs and begging around the Square for money to fund her habit. She begins to neglect Annie again and even dumps her on Sue while she disappears for a week without informing anyone she is going. She becomes an unwitting pawn in Simon Wicks's (Nick Berry) game to bed as many women as possible and is later hurt when he cruelly rejects her. Her father tries desperately to help her regain control of her life, giving her a job as receptionist at his new haulage company. However, upon the arrival of her mother, Edie, Mary decides she is sick of her family's interference, and after vandalising her father's business with paint, she takes Annie, jumps on a bus and leaves Walford, sticking up two fingers in the air as she goes. Over thirty years later, Mary and Annie (now played by Marilyn O'Brien) return for the funeral of Doctor Legg (Leonard Fenton), where they reunite with old friends, Dot, Lofty Holloway (Tom Watt), Sharon Mitchell (Letitia Dean), and Kathy Beale (Gillian Taylforth). They reminisce and Mary thanks Dot for her help with Annie as a child, before leaving. Mary returns over three years later for Dot's funeral, explaining to Sharon that after Dr. Legg's funeral she set up a WhatsApp group with Lofty and Colin Russell (Michael Cashman) in order to keep in touch, which was how she found out that Dot had died. She shares her experiences with Dot during her step-granddaughter Sonia Fowler (Natalie Cassidy)'s eulogy, where she agrees with Disa O'Brien (Jan Graveson) that Dot saw something worth saving in those that people would have deemed lost causes such as herself. Creation and development Mary Smith was one of the original twenty-three characters invented by the creators of EastEnders, Tony Holland and Julia Smith. Mary's original character outline as written by Smith and Holland appeared in an abridged