For years, Anna Wing was my nextdoor neighbour, just two streets from Broadcasting House. Right up until she was 95, I'd see her in all weathers waiting early on her steps for a car to take her to a job. "Just a small role" or "Only a little advert – but it's all work!" And she'd go off as happy as a cricket.
Anna had her favourite outdoor table at the corner cafe opposite us, where she was a life-enhancing, magnetic presence to all in the locality. There was no trace of her Hoxton childhood about her, nor of the cantankerous matriarch, Lou Beale, whom she played in EastEnders. In fact she was fastidiously ladylike, genial and very well-informed, especially with regard to stage and screen – an interest that we shared.
I was particularly surprised to learn of her admiration for and friendship with the playwright Caryl Churchill, a number of whose plays I had directed for Radio 3 and once for the theatre. It transpired that when she was 84, Anna had appeared in a play of Caryl's, Blue Heart, in London and in New York. Of her performance in it, one critic wrote that she was "almost unbearably moving as the fiercely pragmatic 80-year-old bluestocking who remains unable to express emotion when meeting the man she believes to be her lost son".
Anna often sat with three disparate, elderly women – Marge, an ex-dancer, Beryl, a former sound technician (Beryl Ritchie, Other lives, 13 July), and Peggy, once a teacher – two of whom died shortly before she did, leaving her somewhat alone (but not lonely) at her table.
Two of the ladies would do crosswords, and wise Anna would snap out the answers when clues were queried. One clue was "Janus-like". "Two-faced," answered Anna. "Oh, you mean like ----," replied one of the group, naming an awkward acquaintance. "Naughty!" said Anna. "One of her faces can be quite good." And that was the only mildly unkind thing I ever heard her utter. As her EastEnders colleague June Brown said: "She always thought well of everyone.''