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Maud Grimes, the mother-in-law from hell of television's Coronation Street, was tough, rough, domineering, embitteredly disabled and altogether not an obvious candidate for socialite of the year. The actress Elizabeth Bradley played the character for six years and 476 episodes - until she was written out in 1999 - was charming, invariably courteous, bubbly, mentally sharp and physically active to the last. Unlike the downmarket Maud, she was also the daughter of a senior civil servant, Sir John Abraham, who was deputy under-secretary at the Air Ministry from 1940 until he died in Winston Churchill's private plane when it crashed in 1945.
Bradley, who successfully played so many roles unlike herself, was trained in the hard school of repertory theatre, at Bexhill, Bradford and Tunbridge Wells. Late in life, she also took her place at the National Theatre and the Royal Court. On stage, she used her father's middle name, Bradley, and it stuck.
No one in her family had worked in show business, but Sir John, who had come to London from farming stock in Macclesfield, enjoyed the theatre, and delighted in taking his daughter to any performance remotely suitable for a child; from those trips her interest in theatre grew.
During the second world war, she served as a nurse. She studied at the Webber Douglas school of acting, and then went into repertory, where she met her future husband, the actor Gareth Adams, who appeared with her in several productions. In the 1950s, she stopped acting to raise her children, although, in the mid-1960s, she appeared in the Garrick Theatre production of the farce, Thark, with Kathleen Harrison.
When Gareth died suddenly in 1978, Elizabeth threw herself into a fulltime stage and television career. She was in the police series Z Cars and Softly Softly, and in a number of notable productions, such as Momento Mori and The Men's Room, as well as Casualty, Shine On Harvey Moon, The Nine Tailors, Dr Finlay's Casebook and Juliet Bravo.
She starred in David Storey's play Home, with John Gielgud and Ralph Richardson, when Dandy Nichols was taken ill, and she always gave distinctive and memorable life to her supporting roles. She joined Coronation Street in 1993.
That same year, after playing in Billy Liar at the National, she was nominated for an Olivier Award For Best Actress In A Supporting Role. At the Royal Court, she appeared in My Mother Said I Never Should, Women Beware Women, Restoration, and Touched. At the National for Sir Richard Eyre, who found her "a really fine actress and a witty and generous woman", she appeared in Abingdon Square, The Crucible, Black Snow and Caritas.
Her last stage role was as Alan Bennett's mother in the playwright's The Lady In The Van, which starred Dame Maggie Smith; her films included An American Werewolf In London (1981) and Dennis Potter's Brimstone And Treacle (1982).
She always put her resurgence as an actress down to a friend's remark after the death of her husband. He told her that Gareth had always said she would make it to the top.
She was survived by her three children, Brad, Johanna and Sodge.
