Coronation Street star Stephanie Beacham opens up over intruder incident in her home

Coronation Street star Stephanie Beacham has opened up about being the victim of an intruder in her home.

Last year, it was revealed that the Martha Fraser actress had a number of valuable items stolen from her when a man broke into her West London house in September 2022 while she was at home. The perpetrator, David Wilson, was later sentenced to 10 years and five months in prison.

Appearing on Good Morning Britain yesterday (January 30), Beacham spoke in detail about her “terrible” ordeal.

“There I am, it’s Sunday afternoon – you don’t get burgled on a Sunday afternoon, do you?” she began. “Luckily I was dressed for gardening, which meant I had a really dodgy jumper on and no jewellery and probably didn’t look very much like moi.

“Anyway, I heard a noise downstairs and I thought, ‘Well, must be I’ve got an assistant, a friend’. Then I said, ‘Hello?’ and I looked over [and] there he was – the most frightening face, with a crowbar. Nice big crowbar.”

The actress detailed how he then headed upstairs, recalling: “There it was – crowbar over my head, and then the corny dialogue, ‘Give me your money, give me your jewellery, don’t look at me. I wish you weren’t here’.”

She continued on the ITV show that she believed she was going to die. “And I was an absolute wimp, total wimp. And I gave him my money,” she recalled.

“He said, ‘What’s in that handbag?’ [There was a] Valentino handbag that was sitting there. I said, ‘Nothing, look’. I gave him everything. Then he said, ‘Get in there’.

“Well, I didn’t need telling twice. It was my bathroom, got in and locked the door, and I thought, ‘You’ve been such a wimp. You haven’t got a phone because you dropped it when you saw him and he’s got your phone now and the other phone is the other side of the bed, in the other room’. ‘What would Jodie Foster do [in Panic Room]?’, I thought.”

Beacham went on to reveal on the ITV morning show that she “picked up a sponge on a plastic handle” and was “standing there on the other side of the door with a plastic handled sponge”.

Beacham added on the show that after she believed the intruder had gone downstairs, she called the police.

“Weeks later when I was giving the report, I said, ‘You know, I feel almost sorry for him’. And the inspector was incredibly cross with me,” she continued on the morning show. “He said, ‘I heard your 999 call – you thought you were going to die’.”

Beacham played the role of Martha in Coronation Street in 2009, returning again in 2022, and is also well-known for playing Sable Colby in Dynasty.