Coronation Street star Julie Goodyear, who is best known for her portrayal of the feisty Bet Lynch, has been diagnosed with dementia.
Her husband Scott Brand shared the news with fans in a statement: “my darling wife and I have had to come to terms with this heartbreaking diagnosis.”
Scott explained that Julie, 81, had been “suffering forgetfulness for some time” leading them to seek medical help.
He shared that the couple have had to come to terms with the fact that there is “no hope of reversal in this situation” and that they had decided to publicly announce the diagnosis as fans will occasionally approach the star while she’s out and about.
Scott, 65, said that his wife can get “confused” and that he hopes her devoted fans will understand.
Julie has been married to her fourth husband Scott, who is 26 years her junior, since 2007.
She first met the younger man in 1996 when he delivered plaster to her home, which she was in the midst of renovating.
Scott was working as an HGV driver at the time and was immediately smitten by the star.
In 2013 during an interview on Piers Morgan’s Life Stories, Julie admitted that her husband had proposed to her every day for 11 years, but she wasn’t sold on marrying him right away.
Julie joked that “emotional blackmail” lead her to eventually give in.
“He said, you do realise, if you don’t marry me, I’ll never be married. Because I’ll never meet anyone who would ever match up to you,” she revealed. “I said oh go on then. Don’t try and turn it into a love story.”
Julie had been married three times before meeting Scott.
The actress was just 17 when she tied the knot for the first time and has confessed that it was a “shotgun wedding” prompted by the fact she was two months pregnant with her son Gary at the time.
Perhaps expectedly, the marriage didn’t last and she split from her first husband Ray Satcliffe after just four years of marriage in 1963.
She later married Tony Rudman in 1973, but this marriage was even more disastrous than the last.
Julie says she discovered her husband was gay on their wedding night and the relationship was effectively over less than 12 hours after she said I do.
In 1985, the actress married airline exec Richard Skrob, but they split after two years, citing distance as a big issue in their relationship.
The Corrie star then entered a relationship with her former secretary, the late Janet Ross, who she would later describe as her “soulmate.”
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