June Muriel Brown (16 February 1927 – 3 April 2022) was an English actress and author. She was best known for her role as Dot Cotton on the BBC soap opera EastEnders (1985–1993; 1997–2020). In 2005, she won Best Actress at the Inside Soap Awards and received the Lifetime Achievement award at The British Soap Awards. Brown was appointed a Member of the Order of the British Empire (MBE) in the 2008 Birthday Honours for services to drama and to charity, and promoted to an OBE in the 2022 New Year Honours. In 2009, she was nominated for the BAFTA TV Award for Best Actress, making her the second performer to receive a BAFTA nomination for their work in a soap opera, after Jean Alexander. In February 2020, at the age of 93, she announced that she had left EastEnders permanently. Early life Brown was born on 16 February 1927 in Needham Market, Suffolk, one of five children of Louisa Ann (née Butler) and Henry William Melton Brown. Her ancestry included English, Irish and Scottish, and from her maternal grandmother, Sephardic Jewish (from Algeria, the Netherlands and Italy). Through her grandmother, she was descended from the noted Jewish bare-knuckle boxer Isaac Bitton. Brown was educated at St John's Church of England School in Ipswich and then won a scholarship to Ipswich High School, where she passed the school certificate examinations. During the Second World War, she was evacuated to the Welsh village of Pontyates in Carmarthenshire. During the later years of the war, she served in the Wrens and was classically trained at the Old Vic Theatre School in Lambeth, London. Career Film and television Brown had a long television career, with small roles in Coronation Street as Mrs Parsons (1970–71); the Play for Today, Edna, the Inebriate Woman as Clara (1971); the Doctor Who story The Time Warrior as Lady Eleanor (1973–74); the nursing soap Angels; the history-of-Britain Churchill's People; long-running comedy drama Minder; the police drama soap The Bill; and cult sci-fi series Survivors. She had a bigger part as Mrs Leyton in the costume drama The Duchess of Duke Street (1976), and played Mrs Mann in Oliver Twist (1985). She also played Nanny Slagg in the BBC's big-budget production of Gormenghast in 2000. She was cast in small roles in several movies, appearing as the grieving mother of an undead biker in British horror flick Psychomania (1971),