Coronation Street legend told she’s ‘too fat and too disabled for TV’
Denise Black shot to fame in two ITV soaps, but it wasn't easy for her to start out in the world of TV
Coronation Street legend Denise Black was once told she was “too fat and too disabled” to be on TV. The 67-year-old actress is now best known for her role as Denise Osbourne on Corrie, starring in 288 episodes from 1992 until 2017, but it wasn’t easy getting her foot on the ladder when she was starting out. Though she’s now appeared in everything from rival ITV soap Emmerdale to Call the Midwife, TV bosses weren’t always kind to her.
Speaking on Kaye Adams’ How to Be 60 podcast, Denise said: “I'm not going to name the TV companies, but I've been told I'm too fat for television, I'm too disabled for television. All this kind of, ‘You’ve got to fit in and you don’t fit’. My experience of being a woman was a lack of self-esteem, a lack of certainty that I was right, a desire to please, to look good, to feel very chastened when people pointed out things that were wrong with me.”
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Denise added: “I've been told several times, by agents and television companies and photographers, ‘You’ve got a lovely face, it’s a shame about your body’. It lowers your self-esteem. I’m a great one for ‘love people as they are’.”
Denise was born with a condition that affects the muscles in her right arm, causing her fingers to cross over each other. She said the condition got worse as she was trying to hide it for so long during acting jobs.
She said: “I think the reason it's like this is because for 30 years I hid it out of the camera under the table, and it clawed over through lack of use. There's a regret. I don't think you get into your 60s without the odd regret.”
Denise has been candid about her health issues over the years, and admitted that she suffered from a bad back while starring in Emmerdale. She told Metro: “When I was doing Emmerdale last time, I was having the most terrible back troubles.
“I was not in a good space, because it’s a very long journey… and you’re always dragging a bag. I was going to see a masseur because I was stiff and I hurt and I felt old.”
