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Bill Dean has Died

Actor Bill Dean who played Harry Cross In brookside Died of a heart atttack yesterday. He was 78 years old and had been taken into hospital for tests. Mickey Starke (Sinbad) said he was a sweet old man and found it a privalge to know him in his later years. Even when he returned to Brookside for a few episodes last year he managed to make us laugh. Harry always thought of Tv as a game, and would quite often ring Mickey at 2 or 3 o clock in the morning to tell him a joke. Brookside Producer Phil Redmond feels it was both a shock and a tragedy to lose another Merseyside star. He said he was not just part of the family but also part of the furniture at Mersey TV. One of the great lights of Liverpool comedy has gone.

To See a tribute on Harry Cross Visit the Brookside Soapbox Site

Following in her fathers footsteps

Alex Westcourt didn't know whether to laugh or cry when she returned home after landing the role of lesbian Shelley Bowers in Brookside. "On the one hand I knew it was a great part but, on the other, I wasn't sure what my boyfriend was going to say about it, " says Alex. She needn't have worried when the couple were snuggled up together on the sofa watching an episode of Brookside a few days later. Her boyfriend Pete who is a software Engineer told her he is glad she's playing the part of a lesbian rather then someone who spends all her time involved with the men, this way he doesn't feel threatened.

The reaction she got from her boyfriend and many others have surprised and delighted Alex since she joined brookside a year ago. "I've had nothing but good feedback from the public. People seem to regard shelley as a positive character, someone they can trust and confide in.

"I've had quite a few letters from young girls who are homosexual , asking for my advice. I'm not gay myself, so I don't know what they are going through or how they are feeling, but I always write back and just tell them to be true to themselves. "If someone loves you parent, friend or whatever they will love you regardless of your sexuality. "I've also had a woman write in who was keen to draw my portrait, I was fearful that, further down the letter, she was going to ask me to go and pose naked for her, or something, but I think it was all perfectly genuine and innocent and she just wanted my blessing for what she was going to do. "But I still find any kind of public interest in me slightly bizarre. I've never been recognized from TV before and I continue to get the most enormous shock when someone recognizes me from Brookside when I am filling up my supermarket trolley in Tesco's.

Alex is now a regular cast member of Brookside and looks set to enjoy the kind of fame that was once within the grasp of her American father Sacha , who was a young actor back in he 1960's.

The information for the above article was taken from a local Newspaper called The Standard