page_title: Sharon Watts
section_title: Reception
hierarchical_section_title: Sharon Watts / Reception
caption_attribution_description: Letitia Dean at the funeral service for actress Wendy Richard at St Marylebone Parish Church.
context_page_description: Sharon Watts is a fictional character from the BBC One soap opera EastEnders, played by Letitia Dean. Sharon is one of EastEnders' original characters conceptualised by creators Tony Holland and Julia Smith. She first appeared in the first episode broadcast on 19 February 1985 as the teenage adoptive daughter of pub landlords Den and Angie Watts. The character became prominent in the 1990s due to her becoming the landlady of The Queen Victoria public house, and her romantic pairings with brothers Grant and Phil Mitchell. In a storyline dubbed Sharongate, Sharon married to Grant, has an affair with Phil, climaxing in 1994 with Grant's discovery of the affair, which remains one of EastEnders' highest viewed episodes - the storyline was reinvented in 2018 when Sharon began an affair with Phil's young employee, Keanu Taylor. She was named the Best EastEnders character of all time by The Mirror in 2020.
  Dean originally quit the role in 1995 after ten years, with Sharon departing following the breakdown of her marriage. In May 2001, Sharon was reintroduced by producer John Yorke.
context_section_description: Sharon has been dubbed one of the "most popular" characters in EastEnders. Television critic Matt Bayliss, who once wrote storylines for EastEnders, suggested in 2010 that what made Sharon an interesting, classic, female character was that her psychology was laid bare; viewers could see how her troubled upbringing contributed to the mistakes she made and the low self-esteem she had in latter life. In December 2004 the Sunday Mirror reported that executive producer Kathleen Hutchison offered to double Dean's salary from £150,000 a year to £300,000 a year, to persuade her to remain in the show, making her one of the highest paid actresses in British soap opera. In a 2007 poll carried out by Inside Soap, Sharon, who was then on a hiatus from EastEnders, was voted the character that readers most wanted to see return. In a NTL poll in 2003, one third of viewers picked Sharon's comeback in 2001 as their favourite, and in a Radio Times poll of over 5,000 people in 2004, 21% chose Sharon as the soap character they were most pleased to see return.
  Letitia Dean has been nominated for multiple awards for her portrayal of Sharon. In 1995, she was nominated in the "Most Popular Actress" category at the National Television Awards. Dean was nominated for the "Best Actress Award" at the British Soap Awards in 2004, and she was also nominated in the category of "Best Dramatic Performance" for "Den's Return". At the 2005 Inside Soap awards, Dean was presented with the coveted award for outstanding achievement as homage to her work in EastEnders; at the time of the awards ceremony, she had appeared in EastEnders (on and off) for over 20 years. She was also nominated in the category of Best Couple (shared with Nigel Harman). Dean was nominated for "Best Actress" for the Inside Soap Awards 2014. In November 2018, Sharon's pairing with Keanu was nominated for Best Soap Couple at the 2018 Digital Spy Reader Awards; they came in ninth place with 4% of the total votes.
  The character of Sharon has garnered controversy in the British media. In 1985, The Sun newspaper branded EastEnders "Too sexy for kids" and suggested it could be a bad influence on children, with Sharon touted as a reason for this. Described as a "teenage temptress" Sharon was criticised for flashing her mini-skirted legs at pub customers and fondling the bottom of a barman, Lofty Holloway (Tom Watt). Television clean-up campaigner Mary Whitehouse said, "This show should be X-rated. This kind of thing is just not on. It is an adults-only soap opera. I shudder to think of the embarrassing questions parents face from their children after Sunday [omnibus] afternoon viewing." A BBC spokesperson responded, "It is not our policy to be sexually provocative. It just mirrors real life in the East End of London."
  In 2001, a storyline that saw Sharon confessing to her lover Phil that she was infertile was discussed in The Guardian by Jenni Murray. Of interest to the journalist was Sharon's declaration that she had become infertile because she aborted Grant's baby in 1995, and although the abortion was successful, she did not take a post-op course of anti-biotics; it was a subsequent infection that left her infertile. Of concern to Murray was the deleterious effect that broadcasting such a negative outcome of abortion may have on any female viewers considering the procedure. Murray stated: "It's easy to see why infertility as a result of abortion is manna from heaven to writers hungry for dramatic storylines. Could there be any greater irony than to abort the foetus of one man [Grant], fall in love with his brother [Phil], long to have his child and then find that the dire consequences of the first action deprive you of the delights of the second [...] But how much poetic licence has to be employed to service these plots in which women are consistently punished for exercising their legal right to choose to abort a foetus they don't want to carry? In Sharon's case because she was running away from a violent man". Discussing the matter, Ann Furedi of the British Pregnancy Advisory Service conf
caption: Letitia Dean (pictured), has been nominated for numerous awards for the role of Sharon Watts. In 2005, Inside Soap honoured her with an "Outstanding Achievement Award".
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