Jennifer Victoria "Jenny" Moss (10 January 1945 – 5 October 2006) was an English actress and singer born in Wigan, Lancashire. She was best known for her role as Lucille Hewitt on the long-running soap opera, Coronation Street, which she played from 1960-74.

Biography

Moss successfully battled alcoholism in the 1980s, which was ultimately the reason of her being sacked from Coronation Street by then producer, Susi Hush, for bad behaviour in 1974. Moss stated that she drank to numb the pain she felt after the death of her father, Reg. In an interview with the Evening Times in 1979, Moss, then living in a three-apartment house in Wigan, found for her by the local Social Works Department when she was homeless, Moss said: "My youngest daughter, Sarah, is only three years old and is mentally handicapped... while I was pregnant I was drinking all the time. I will go to my grave with this damage to my child on my conscience." Her eldest daughter, Naomi (like Sarah) was taken into care, and her baby boy had died when he was three days old in 1976.

In August 1980, it was reported that Moss and her then fourth husband had broken into a local Labour club in a search for drink. She left court and was put on probation for two years.

Moss joined Alcoholics Anonymous and decided to settle in Liverpool in 1982, on the basis that the city had 28 Alcoholics Anonymous meetings weekly. She lived in a house owned by the Merseyside Housing Improvement Trust and began to sort her life out. Before reviving her acting career, she took on various jobs as a waitress and a taxi driver but there were also court appearances for breaking and entering and shoplifting, a charge of which she was cleared.

She was married five times. She wed her first husband, the son a millionaire in 1968, but they divorced the following year after Jennifer gave birth to their daughter. She then married a Leeds motor dealer who was violent to her. Her third marriage was to a man ten years her junior and an alcoholic, and her fourth marriage to a Liberal worker eighteen years younger than her also dissolved quickly. In 1989, Moss wed her fifth husband, computer software expert and Cambridge graduate Stephen Ramsden, and was happily married to him until her death.

Towards the end of her life, she reconciled with her daughter Naomi, who later married and made Moss a grandmother. She was also often reunited with former and current Coronation Street stars when she attended launches and anniversary parties. She and Ramsden ran an Internet stamp collecting business.

According to the Wigan News, Moss had been in failing health in recent years, but made a spiritual pilgrimage to India in the last year, where she finally came to terms with her father's death.