Sylvia Ann Butterfield was born in
Leeds,
West Riding of Yorkshire, to parents Albert and Annie Butterfield. She grew up on the city's
Halton Moor estate and began her performing career as a
nightclub singer. During the 1970s, she appeared in supporting roles in programmes including
All Creatures Great and Small and
Colin Welland's television play
Leeds United (1974) and several other episodes of the
Play for Today series in the mid-1970s. Dawn made several appearances in the
Granada Television daytime series
Crown Court. Initially in an un-credited role of a prison officer, in 1975 she played the character of Bedelia Conroy, a
public house licensee and witness in a deception trial. She was the subject of a
This is Your Life episode in 1989, when she was surprised by
Michael Aspel on the set of
Coronation Street. Following a diagnosis of
emphysema in March 2004, on 22 July 2007,
Granada Television (makers of
Coronation Street) announced that Vera Duckworth was to be written out, at Dawn's request, before Christmas, because of further complications with the condition. Dawn's final appearance came in the episode screened on 18 January 2008, when Vera Duckworth died in her sleep, thus ending 34 years of the character's appearances in the series. On 8 November 2010, she made a brief one-off return to the soap for the final scenes of her on-screen husband, Jack, who died in the same chair as Vera. Dawn appeared as Vera's spirit, who had come to take Jack on his final journey and the pair enjoyed one final dance together. She came out of retirement in December 2015 to make a one-off guest appearance in the soap
Emmerdale as the character
Mrs Winterbottom. Dawn was appointed an
MBE in the
2000 Queen's Birthday Honours, for services to the
Manchester Children's Hospital, the Genesis Appeal and the Liz Dawn Breast Cancer Appeal,
St. James's Hospital,
Leeds. Dawn won the
British Soap Award for Outstanding Achievement at the
2008 ceremony for her decades-long portrayal of her fictional character Vera Duckworth. ==Personal life and death==