Her mother worked in a mill, her father was a fireman, and young Barbara Brothwood from ­Oldham, Lancashire, grew up with gritty survival instilled at the ­forefront of any professional ambition.

“If you are a typist or a hairdresser, it’s in your hands,” she was warned by her parents. “They can’t cut your hands off!” But that little girl, born in the Pennines industrial town in 1933, had been given a snatched glimpse of bright lights each summer on holidays to Blackpool, and in the Tower Ballroom, where her parents loved to dance, she was introduced to the notion of entertainment, reports the Irish Mirror.

It was a notion Barbara, who turns 90 today, couldn’t shake, one which ­eventually led her to pursue her dream to perform on stage, and which took root and grew beyond all expectations on Coronation Street, where she has recently signed a new contract almost 60 years after her first appearance as the indomitable redhead Rita.

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“Well, I was just blown away, I couldn’t believe it. All I wanted was to be a chorus girl,” she laughingly recalled of her Blackpool excursions in a rare interview for ITV documentary Rita and Me. It’s been the journey of a lifetime,” she added, tearful with emotion. “From a very ordinary girl, from a very ordinary street, never in my wildest dreams did I think it would come to this.”

On October 13, ITV will air a second special documentary hosted by TV presenter Bradley Walsh, celebrating her long career. It will, like its predecessor, be a rarity. For a persona so instantly recognised and beloved, Barbara has always limited the interviews she has given, meaning we truly know little about the woman behind the star.

She has always been “very shy”, she’s admitted, although her mother told her early on: “Barbara, you can’t hide your light under a bushel. Unless you tell people what you can do, unless you show them, you will never get anywhere.” It was advice she heeded. Perhaps her mum couldn’t guess where that light would shine, but it has shone, and ­dazzlingly.

Initially on leaving school Barbara followed advice to secure a sensible profession, working in the large Post Office in Manchester. But her heart wasn’t in it. An understanding aunty encouraged her dreams, suggesting to her parents young Barbara was different – “a bit romantic”.

And in May 1962, at 28, she won her first role at Oldham’s theatre, learning a craft which would sustain her for the rest of her life. Hands or no hands. Just four years later, the opportunity to appear on Coronation Street knocked, and Barbara thought she’d cracked it. She was to star as Rita Littlewood, a beautiful, fiery, exotic dancer and old pal of Dennis Tanner (Philip Lowrie).

“I thought, ‘I’m going to be in this forever, that’s just the part I have been looking for’,” she admitted. But the role lasted just two episodes, and it would be 1972 before she was invited back. In the meantime, she settled into life as a jobbing actor, working in theatre, radio, and in TV sketches with some of the biggest names in comedy, including Les Dawson and Mike Yarwood.

It was during filming for a sketch show with Ken Dodd that ­Coronation Street called again. And she wasn’t sure he would release her to take them up. In another ­interview, this time with her great friend, the late Paul O’Grady, she recalled how the comic told her she could go grab her chance.

“We worked all day and it got to the evening and the last sketch was in a forest. I was playing a nurse and I walked by him lying under a tree. He hadn’t spoken to me all day, and he just looked up and said, ‘Don’t let me down on Coronation Street’,” she remembered. “I am very grateful.”

Of joining the cast she has recalled being so nervous she even lost her voice after a few days. The actors she worked alongside were some of the biggest names of the day, including Violet Carson who played Ena Sharples, and Pat Phoenix – Elsie Tanner. “I was terrified of them,” she said.

“I was one of the first of the young ones,” she recalled. “And it was very formal. In the green room you didn’t sit on that chair, or that chair. You dressed smart every day, you knew your place.” But Rita’s strong character soon became as beloved as those other fearsome women.

And far from losing her voice, she found one she didn’t know she had – regularly singing in the show in character, and even releasing an album of tunes in 1973. As Rita, she has been married three times and proposed to some 15, by 12 men. (She has admitted keeping the engagement rings.)

The long-term storyline around her relationship with Alan Bradley, ending in the notorious Blackpool tram scene in 1989, which killed off the baddie, won her the TV Times award for Best Actress. And her double acts with Mavis (Thelma Barlow) and Norris (Malcolm Hebden), touching and hilarious by turns, are some of the most memorable in soap history.

Off-screen, Barbara has married twice, first to Denis Mullaney in 1956. The pair had three children. The year they divorced, in 1977, she married John Knox, but the couple divorced in 1994. Her decision to give few details of her personal life is born both of her natural shyness, and her love for “quiet”.

Touchingly, she confided in O’Grady she “used” Rita’s character to help her over her nerves. “In real life I’m very quiet,” she said. “I love to be home, I do tapestry, I do my garden, I love my dog. I live a very different life.” She grinned: “If I’m ever stuck I just say something like Rita would say!”

Perhaps then, in the end, not a wholly different life to that of her parents in Oldham. Although ultimately they were nothing but supportive of the different path she chose. She has described her mother as “marvellous”, “going without so I could have”. Before she died, she bought her daughter a fur hat.

“I said, ‘Where am I going to go with a hat like that, mother?’,” Barbara recalled. “She said, ‘It might come in handy, you never know’.” She finally wore that hat nearly three decades after her mum’s death, in 2010, when she was awarded a MBE. Those Oldham folk perhaps knew better than she did how far she’d go. “I wanted to wear that hat for my mother and my family,” she explained. “Because they had done so much for me.”

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