Annie Sugden (also Pearson, Kempinski and Brearly) is a fictional character from the British television soap opera Emmerdale. She was played by Sheila Mercier as a regular character between 1972 and 1994, with occasional guest appearances in the show after her original departure. Mercier cut back on location filming during the late 1980s and eventually left the serial in 1994 due to the gruelling schedule. Annie was one of Emmerdale's original characters, appearing in its first episode on 16 October 1972 and became the longest serving female character in the series' history. She was the soap's "first matriarch", the maternal force behind the Sugden family, who were collectively one of Emmerdale's main focal points. Over the years, the character featured in a number of storylines, including being widowed twice, coping with the deaths of various other family members, financial woes, nearly dying in a farmhouse fire, an addiction to tranquillisers and sustaining injuries in the Emmerdale plane crash, which left her in a three-month coma. Mercier and Frazer Hines, who played her on-screen son Joe Sugden, were the only two original cast members to appear in the show for its 20th anniversary. Though the character left the serial in 1994, she has made occasional appearances since this time and last appeared on-screen in February 2009, in a special tribute episode to mark the death of Clive Hornby who played her on-screen son, Jack Sugden. Mercier has previously made guest appearances in 1996 and in 2000 for a special web broadcast in which Annie talked to her troubled screen son Jack. The broadcast was available for viewers to download on the official Emmerdale website. Despite having married Amos off-screen in late 1995, she was credited upon her return in 2009 by her most famous name, Annie Sugden. Mercier died in December 2019 and this was written into the seriaL, with the character of Annie dying off-screen in August 2020.