Actress Anna Cropper performed on British TV for more than four decades and was a commanding presence in challenging television plays of the 1960s and 1970s, most shockingly as the young schizophrenic, Kate Winter in writer David Mercer's In Two Minds. Later, she played Mrs Laker in the daytime marriage-guidance counsellors serial Couples (1975-76), Nan Wheeler, who nursed farmer Tad Ryland's sick wife, Bella, in Emmerdale (1976) and the matriarch Margaret Castle in the family saga Castles (1995).
