TV trailblazer Kay Mellor – who created Band Of Gold and Fat Friends – left more than £13.2million to her family after she died aged 72.
One of Britain’s finest TV writers and a trailblazer for British working class drama over the past three decades, Mellor died suddenly in May 2022, just days after her 71st birthday.
Writing hit series after hit series including Band of Gold, Playing the Field, Fat Friends and The Syndicate, she earned an OBE in 2009 and was awarded the Writers Guild Award for Outstanding Contribution to Writing in 2014.
Her work helped transformed the careers of many young British stars including James Corden, Jude Law, Samantha Morton and Ruth Jones, who said at the time: ‘British television has lost one of its greats’.
Mellor’s will put her money into trust for her husband Anthony, her two daughters Emmerdale and Coronation Street actor Gaynor Faye and television producer Yvonne Francas, and her extended family.
The estate had a net value of £13,231,014, rising to £14,640,914 in gross value.
She dictated that she wanted her body to be buried, with her husband and daughters as the Trustees and her friend Linda Neary – who appeared on her This Is Your Life special – working as a substitute Executor.
All of her personal belongings and business property were to be given to her husband.
Ms Mellor’s gritty and often hilariously funny northern dramas mirrored her own extraordinary life, which began in poverty in Leeds.
She had her daughter Yvonne aged 16 and then Gaynor at 19. It was only in her late 20s that she went to night school, doing an A-Level in theatre studies that would inspire her to write.
Her tutor saw her talent and encouraged her to go to university, where she would forge ideas that would become much loved TV hits watched by millions each week, after stints paying the bills by acting in commercials and writing scenes for Coronation Street.
