Pauline Fowler
Pauline Fowler is a fictional character from the BBC One soap opera EastEnders. She was played by actress Wendy Richard between the first episode on 19 February 1985 and 25 December 2006. Pauline was created by scriptwriter Tony Holland and producer Julia Smith as one of EastEnders' original characters. She made her debut in the soap's first episode on 19 February 1985, and remained for twenty-one years and ten months, making her the second-longest-running original character to appear continuously, surpassed only by her nephew Ian Beale. Since then, she has been surpassed by Letitia Dean who plays Sharon Watts. Pauline has featured in archive footage twice since her departure: in 2010, celebrating the show's 25th anniversary, and in 2025, celebrating the show's 40th anniversary.
Pauline is a member of the Beale family. Her storylines focus on drudgery, money worries, and family troubles. The matriarchal stalwart of the fictional London community of Albert Square, she is at first portrayed as a loving, doting, very family-oriented mother. In later years, however, she becomes a more stoic, opinionated battle-axe who alienates her relatives through overbearing interference. Pauline is married to the downtrodden Arthur Fowler ; when she finds out he had a one-night stand with Christine Hewitt, she hits him with a frying pan. Their marriage remains rocky until his death in 1996. She is used for comedic purposes in scenes with her launderette colleague Dot Cotton, and scriptwriters included many feuds in her narrative, most notably with her daughter-in-law, Sonia Fowler, Queen Vic Landlady Peggy Mitchell, who cruelly announced to the public that Pauline’s son Mark Fowler has AIDS, and Den Watts, a family friend who got her daughter Michelle Fowler pregnant at 16. A famous episode in 1986 which includes Pauline discovering that Den is the father of Michelle's baby, drew over 30 million viewers, and was listed at number 36 in The Times' 1998 list of "Top 100 cult moments in Film". Richard announced Pauline's retirement from the serial in July 2006, and the character was killed off in a "Whodunit?" murder storyline, with Richard making her final appearance on 25 December 2006.
Pauline was a staple in the UK press during her time in EastEnders, representative of the symbiosis between Britain's soaps and tabloid newspapers. Widely-read tabloids such as The Sun and Daily Mirror, would routinely publish articles about forthcoming developments in Pauline's storylines. Critical opinion on the character differs. She has been described as a "legend" and a television icon, but was also voted the 35th "most annoying person of 2006". The character is well-known even outside of the show's viewer-base, and away from the on-screen serial, Pauline has been the subject of television documentaries, behind-the-scenes books, tie-in novels, and comedy sketch shows.
Character creation
Background
Pauline Fowler is one of the original 23 characters invented by the creators of EastEnders, Tony Holland and Julia Smith. Holland had drawn on his own London background for inspiration, naming three of the original characters after his own relatives, specifically his aunt Lou and her children, Holland's cousins, fraternal twins Pete and Pauline. This family setup of a woman named Lou Beale, with twin children Pete and Pauline, was recreated on-screen as the first family of EastEnders, the Beales and Fowlers.Pauline's original character outline as written by Smith and Holland appears in an abridged form in their book, EastEnders: The Inside Story.
Casting
From the beginning, Smith considered the role ideal for Wendy Richard, with whom she had worked on the 1960s BBC soap, The Newcomers; Holland and Smith decided to approach her about the role, even though their casting policy was not to use "stars"—Richard was already well known in the UK for playing glamorous roles, such as Shirley Brahms in the successful sitcom Are You Being Served? At their first meeting, Tony Holland informed Richard that they were planning a programme that would not "duck social issues but would be a hard-hitting drama including teenage pregnancy, drugs, racial conflict, prostitution, rape, mental illness, homosexuality, alcoholism, and muggings among its subjects." In order to carry such controversial storylines, Richard was told that "powerful characters to whom things just naturally happened" had been invented, and two families, the Fowlers and the Beales, were to form the core of the soap's narrative. In her autobiography, Richard states, "If I accepted, my character was to be Pauline Fowler. A middle-aged mother of two teenagers, with a late baby on the way, Pauline worked part-time at the launderette, voted Labour and supported Arsenal. She was married to Arthur, who was out of work and was really a bit of a failure, not much good at anything in life." Richard thought it sounded like a challenging role.There were initial fears that Richard's glamorous image would not work for the character and Smith also feared that Richard would be apprehensive about playing Pauline, who would be anything but glamorous, but these fears were swept aside when Richard announced that she was sick of glamour and wanted to play her own age. Richard has commented, "although it would be such a huge transformation of my screen image, it was after all my twenty-fifth year in showbusiness, and I'd realised that I couldn't go on playing dolly birds forever ... I knew right away I would be mad to turn down the part of Pauline."
After she accepted the role, Richard was told by Julia Smith that she would have to change her appearance, to make it more in keeping with Pauline's unglamorous lifestyle. This included having her hair cut. Richard commented on this: "I was very proud of my long hair, which had taken me years to grow. I hadn't had it cut short for nineteen years but reluctantly, I agreed ... I cried my eyes out for the rest of the day after that traumatic hair cut." From September 1984, Richard was involved in pre-production of the series, covering every angle, from hair, costume design and make-up to organising the set interior of her character's screen house. Richard has said that Pauline had been given extensive biographical detail, including minute specifics, such as her fictional time of her birth: "It was vital that we should get to know our own characters intimately and so the cast initially sat together in family groups to learn our lines and bond with our 'relations' ... it was essential to develop the rapport that families, who'd been together for years, would naturally have." Richard's casting was considered to be "a giant leap of faith" by co-creators Holland and Smith, but one that ultimately "landed on its feet", because Pauline went on to be one of the longest running characters in EastEnders' history, remaining with the show for nearly twenty-two years.
Character development and impact
Lineage and personality
The character of Pauline was a cornerstone of EastEnders; the lynchpin of the Fowler/Beale family around whom the soap was originally structured. At the beginning of the serial in 1985, Pauline was a 40-year-old married mother with two teenage children, Mark and Michelle, and another child on the way. The fictional history of her younger years has been told via behind-the-scenes books such as EastEnders: The Inside Story, and the second tie-in novel by Hugh Miller, Swings and Roundabouts, which explains that Pauline was born and raised at 45 Albert Square, where she lived for her entire life. She married Arthur Fowler in 1965, raising her own children in the same house where she grew up.Whereas most of the other female characters in EastEnders were portrayed in a somewhat more glamorous working-class way, Pauline Fowler was the exception to the rule, being the sole character to represent the "homely and domestic" side of the Beale family. As the serial progressed, the character altered from her original outline. Instead of being the jolly, warm character she was during the show's early years, she became a sombre battle-axe, hardened by a life of misery in Albert Square. Other characters refer to her as "Fowler the growler", and in the Evening Gazette she was described as "the Boadicea of battle-axes." The initial change in her demeanour is traced back to the death of her mother, Lou Beale, a fierce dowager, who ruled over her family with a "rod of iron". Following Lou's screen funeral in July 1988, Pauline retorts, "Shut up Arthur Fowler, no one interrupts Pauline Beale when she's in full flow", a line that was used similarly by Lou in the episode that preceded her own death. This parallel symbolised the transference of the family's matriarchal role from Lou to Pauline. Wendy Richard indicated that both she and show creator Julia Smith had always intended for Pauline to become like her mother, and former EastEnders executive producer John Yorke has commented on the importance of the lineage between the two characters: " endures, stoically and heroically, whatever life may throw at her, just as her mother did before her. This sense of lineage is vitally important, too. Pauline has been in the show since its start and was handed the role of matriarch on Lou Beale's death."
Early storylines
In the first episode, it is revealed that Pauline, aged 40, is pregnant with her third child. The character's pregnancy quickly became a prominent storyline within the series. Pauline, against her mother's opposition, is determined to keep the baby. The storyline was used to spread a public message on the increased risk of genetic defects in late pregnancies, with Pauline undergoing amniocentesis tests. The storyline culminates with the birth of the serial's first baby, Martin, in July 1985.Pauline's early storylines concentrate on family and money troubles: coping with her husband Arthur's redundancy, mental breakdown and imprisonment; eldest son Mark's delinquency; and daughter Michelle's teenage pregnancy.
In 1989, the character was used to highlight another important gynaecological health issue, fibroids. The storyline sees Pauline ignoring health problems, such as chronic fatigue, and using homoeopathic preparations rather than seeking medical assistance. Her fibroids are discovered by chance, when the character Ricky Butcher knocks her down in his Austin Mini. In the 1989 Boxing Day episode, Pauline spends time in hospital, recovering from a necessary hysterectomy. Wendy Richard has since revealed that the storyline had originally been scripted differently. Before the outcome of Pauline's illness was screened, producers had decided that the character was to be killed off with cancer. This was a decision that had been made by the show's boss, Mike Gibbon, to refresh the format by replacing some of the serial's older characters. The scriptwriters went as far as giving Pauline a mystery illness. The newly appointed executive producer, Michael Ferguson, decided to scrap the original storyline, believing that Pauline, as one of the soap's original characters, was too valuable an asset to lose. The storyline was rewritten and the character was given a different gynaecological ailment that was treatable.