She bagged herself bona fida iconic soap character status when it was discovered that she shot Phil back in 2001 after the whole country went a bit nuts and started betting on it.
And now Lisa Fowler is back in a storyline that makes way too much sense for soap.
Her daughter Louise has been the victim of burning by school bullies and needs her mum, so, er, her mum’s there. LOGICAL.
What would normally happen in soap: it would be glaringly obvious that her mum should be there, we’d all be muttering at home that AS IF her mum wouldn’t be there, but no-one would mention her mum not being there.
So well done EastEnders for something approaching real life.
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Lucy says that for her, the plot that she returned for made sense.
“[One of the storyliners] called me personally and explained the journey that Lisa would have,” she told The Mirror.
“She made it too good an offer to refuse. As soon as I spoke to her I said ‘okay, I’ll do it’.”
Lucy’s return involved a lot of secrecy too, with big sunglasses, fake character names on scripts and monitors going blank when she appeared on screen.
Basically she’s Walford’s curly-haired, tiny James Bond.
Louise, who returned to Walford with her dad last year, has been left with third-degree burns after she was pushed by bullies into a load of lit candles at her school prom.
Lisa will turn up at hospital from her home in Portugal to see her daughter.
And there’s always the chance that she could hang around…
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“Coming back reminded me how much I loved the workload,” Lucy, who now has two children, told The Mirror.
“As much as it’s hard, I love the craft so much and working to that extent. It was great to get my teeth back into doing what I do.”
But she does admit that she hasn’t been sat at home refreshing her email and waiting for the chance to come back to Walford.
“At first I wasn’t too sure because it is a chapter that was closed and it wasn’t something I’d thought about,” she told The Mirror.
“You don’t live your life thinking ‘I wonder if’. I didn’t know how I felt about it and with having kids too, I didn’t know the length of time I was going to be back for. But once I knew how fabulous the storyline was I was thrilled.”
You know who probably isn’t thrilled? Phil Mitchell. Anyone flogging three-for-a-pound bulletproof vests on that market these days?