Coro star's secret pain 'WHY I HAD TO LEAVE MY DREAM ROLE'

Alexandra could have played it safe, but reveals a health crisis has made her reassess life

- Judy Kean

Actress Alexandra Mardell has always been quick to point out her Coronation Street character, ditzy Emma Brooker.

She's not unlucky in love - unlike Emma, who's lurched from one disastrous relationship to another, she's happily engaged to actor Joe Parker - and she's not as gullible as her character, who is often not the sharpest knife in the drawer.

But there have been a couple of parallels between her life and Emma's that proved useful when it came to playing the bubbly hairdresser-turned-barmaid.

Alexandra, 28, who has just left the show after four years, says tragedies she has experienced helped when it came to what Emma was going through on screen.

In one storyline, the man Emma thought was her dad, John Brooker, became seriously ill with cancer, and she had to deal with the trauma of his death. Just two years before landing the Coro job, Alexandra lost her dad Michael, who died at 54 from an undiagnosed heart condition, cardiomyopathy.

Although her parents separated when she was young, she was very close to her father, a former semiprofessional footballer, and could relate to Emma's grief.

“I was very much a daddy's girl," tells Alexandra, the youngest of two children.