Bill Roache handed OBE at investiture ceremony for services to acting

Bill Roache received an Order of the British Empire [OBE] by King Charles III for services to acting after more than 60 years on Coronation Street.

The 90-year-old actor, who holds the world record for longest-serving television actor in a continuing role for playing Ken Barlow on Coronation Street since it began in 1960, attended an inauguration ceremony on Wednesday morning. .

Bill, who previously received an MBE, revealed the hilarious reaction of King Charles, 74, who jokingly asked: ‘You still don’t work, do you?’

After meeting the monarch, Bill said: “Oh, I love the royal family, I met the Queen about seven times.”

“Charles is very, very friendly and possibly calmer in a way.”

He added: “But the Queen was even, when she came (to visit the Coronation Street set) less than a year ago, she always listened, she was attentive, she was focused and she didn’t miss a trick.” She was very bright.

And they always love humor, everyone, which I like. I am very fond of the royal family.

Bill said that he and the King had discussed their respective workloads during the ceremony and said: ‘Charles was lovely, very kind.

‘He said, ‘You’re not still working, are you?’; I said, ‘Yeah, I just had two ex-girlfriends on the show.

“He said, ‘Oh, that must have been work,’ and I said, ‘May I wish you a long and happy reign, sir?’ And he said, ‘Thank you, that will be a lot of work, too.’

Born in Ilkeston, Derbyshire, where Bill Roache’s father was the village GP, his early studies were near home at the Rudolph Steiner School, run on the principles of the Austrian philosopher, which sparked his interest for life in astrology and the paranormal.

He then went to Rydal School, a boarding school in North Wales, a long way from the bombed-out towns and cities of Britain at the time.

National Service continued with the Royal Welsh Fusiliers and, in his five years in uniform, he rose to the rank of captain, but suffered an accident during live ammunition training with a mortar squad which permanently damaged his hearing.

Roache said he felt an ‘obligation’ to follow generations of his family who had gone into the medical profession but he was not an expert in science.

His mother had been a keen amateur actress, although she initially felt that he was too shy to act.

But after leaving the army at 26, he decided to give it a try, the desire to become an actor “burning in me,” he said.

Minor roles followed before his first big TV break when author Tony Warren spotted him for the role of Ken Barlow for a new TV show he was doing called Coronation Street.

Depicting a typical down-to-earth northern community, it revisited the social realism style of early 1960s kitchen sink dramas that depicted working-class life, spending time drinking in dingy pubs, living , loving and rowing with shame. -Neighborhood neighbors in neighborhood stores, cafeterias and semi-detached houses.

Granada bosses and critics criticized the show, originally commissioned for just 11 weeks, but viewers disagreed.

The Street went into the ‘stratosphere’, Roache said later, becoming the most watched television show in Britain in six months.

Roache scoffs at his life’s work being called simply ‘soap’, claiming the show was ‘cutting edge’ and ‘very prestigious’.

But as his star rose like the ‘heartbeat’ of the Calle, his personal life began to falter.

He had married Anna Cropper while they were both acting in Nottingham and sharing time between a flat in Primrose Hill, London, where most acting jobs came from, and a Lancashire bungalow near his Manchester workplace.

Their son Linus was born in February 1965 and their daughter Vanya in 1967, but with two small children and living between London and the north, the marriage failed.

The relationship was not ‘satisfactory’ and he admitted to a series of relationships with other women from 1965 onwards.

He would later speak liberally about his years of drinking and womanizing, not shyly denying when the figure of 1,000 lovers was presented to him in a television interview.

He met his second wife, Sara Mottram, in 1971 and has been “completely and utterly faithful” ever since, he said, and the couple married in 1978.

In 1981 they had a daughter, Verity, but three years later their second daughter, Edwina, died at 18 months of bronchial pneumonia, before their son James was born four years later.

Throughout his troubles he was never off screen and was presented with a ‘Lifetime Achievement’ Award at the British Soap Awards in 2000 to mark 40 years on the streets.

The following year, he was awarded the Member of the British Empire for services to television drama.

But in 2009 tragedy struck again when his second wife, Sara, died suddenly of a heart condition, at the age of 58.

A year later he became the world’s longest-serving television actor in a continuing role and around this time began a relationship with television meteorologist Emma Jesson, 36 years his junior.

But after three years they broke up, supposedly because Roache wanted to focus on his ‘spiritual path’.

He has never hidden his unconventional beliefs, from being photographed in flowing robes at druid rituals in the 1970s to his current membership in the Pure Love movement.

Roache has what he calls his ‘knowledge: a voice of knowledge that I know to be right, that I live by’.

He believes in reincarnation and in an ‘absolute deity, a total God’, but denies belonging to any ‘cult, philosophy or religion’.

Bill has no plans to retire from his role as Ken in Coronation Street and said in May that he still wants to play the character when he is 100 years old.

talked with Mirror about how he stays young. He told the publication: ‘Someone said to me, ‘Look, Bill, you’re in the Guinness Book of Records, you’ve got the MBE, you’ve been on Coronation Street for over 60 years, what else is there?’

“I told him, ‘I would like to be the first centenarian who is still in an ongoing drama.’ That’s my goal, to be 100 years old and still work on Coronation Street.’

“As long as they love me and as long as I can do it, I’ll continue to do it.”