Marlene Sidaway (born 1937) was born on Teesside and is a British television and film actress best known for playing Brenda Taylor in the long-running soap opera Coronation Street. In 1961 she was accepted into the East 15 Acting School in London. She is also President of the International Brigade Memorial Trust,(succeeding the late Jack Jones when he died) commemorating the volunteers who enlisted to fight Fascism in the Spanish Civil War, she met her much older partner, David Marshall, having been a member of the Brigade. They lived together from 1990 until his death in 2005.