EastEnders star Michelle Collins has reflected on the backlash she received when she joined Coronation Street.

Before returning to EastEnders in the role of Cindy Beale in 2023, Collins starred on Corrie as Rovers Return landlady Stella Price from 2011 to 2014.

Speaking to Lisa Snowdon and Andy Goldstein on the We’re Not Getting Any Younger podcast, the soap star, who hails from London, looked back on being criticised over her northern accent in the soap.

“I was the landlady of the Rovers and I think people were like, ‘Firstly, we can’t have a Londoner running the Rovers’, so they made me northern,” she said.

“Which I think people were like, ‘That’s odd, that’s strange, Michelle Collins is from London and now she’s got a northern accent and wasn’t she Cindy in EastEnders’,” she continued.

Collins recalled practicing with a dialect coach to nail the accent, though that didn’t spare her some initial criticism.

“They kind of couldn’t really get their head around it and I went to a dialect coach and everything, but yeah, people were very critical in the beginning, which kind of upset me a bit, but do you know what? It just takes time,” she said.

Discussing her Corrie stint, Goldstein asked Collins how she secured the role and how she felt about the switch from her success on EastEnders.

“I absolutely had to go through hoops to get it and it wasn’t easy,” the actor said about getting the part of Stella, recalling her meetings with Tony Warren, Corrie‘s late creator and writer.

“It wasn’t easy. We all have our ups and downs as actors,” she concluded.

Last month, Collins temporarily left Walford after EastEnders‘s big 40th anniversary explosion storyline. In her exit scenes, Cindy vowed revenge on those who’ve wronged her, first and foremost Kathy Beale, who attacked her with a shovel and left her for dead on Christmas Day.