Betty Mary Driver, MBE (born 20 May 1920 in Leicester) is an English singer, actress and author, most noted for her role as Betty Williams on the British soap Coronation Street.
Betty Driver was born to parents Frederick and Nellie Driver in 1920 at the Prebend Nursing Home in Leicester. She weighed 5.5 kg (12 lb). Her father fought in the trenches during the First World War and later became a policeman. However, it is her mother whom Driver has described as "the driving force" in her life. Driver has commented, "the only way I can explain her behaviour is that she wanted to live out her ambitions through me."
The Driver family moved to West Didsbury, Manchester in 1922, where they resided in a semi-detached house alongside other police families. Driver went to school at Wilbraham Road and was later joined there by her younger sister Freda, who shared a class with a young Pat Phoenix, who would go on to star as Elsie Tanner in Coronation Street.
Driver has described her parents as absent of affection, stating that they never celebrated birthdays and rarely gave her toys and gifts. Though she maintains her father never beat them, their mother "more often lashed out". Driver has stated that her mother never wanted children and developed an interest in her only when she discovered she had a talent for singing. When she was 7, the Drivers went to see a production called the Quaintesques, a group of men dressed as women, when the star, Billy Manders, asked the audience to join in with a chorus. Driver's singing stood out so much that Manders asked her to come forward and sing with him. From then on, Driver's mother began taking her to various talent contests in Manchester, and she won them all. She has commented, "I imitated hits by Gracie Fields such as 'Sing As We Go', and 'The Biggest Aspidistra In the World', corny little numbers that I detested but mother adored [...] I think she was a frustrated performer herself and she was determined that my sister Freda and I were going to fulfil all her dreams."
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