My mother, Rosemary Frankau, who has died aged 84, was an actor best known for playing Beattie in the BBC sitcom Terry and June.
Born in Marylebone, central London, to the comedian Ronald Frankau and his wife, the actor Renee Roberts, who played the role of Miss Gatsby in Fawlty Towers, Rosie had a sister, Roberta (Robbie), and several half-siblings from her father’s other marriages.
She was evacuated during the blitz to the Kent countryside. Despite the doodlebugs overhead, this was the happiest period of her childhood as friends of the family provided a true hearth and home for the duration of the second world war. Afterwards she was sent to boarding school at Monkton Wyld in Dorset, paid for by an aunt.
She graduated from Rada in her 20s and learned her trade in the flourishing British repertory theatre of the 1950s, touring around the country. In the late 50s to 60s she was a star member of Hazel Vincent Wallace’s repertory cast at Leatherhead theatre. As a member of the Royal Shakespeare Company, Rosie played Hippolyta in A Midsummer Night’s Dream at the Royal Shakespeare Theatre in 1962, a production directed by Peter Hall, and starring Judi Dench and Ian Richardson.
Rosie moved into screen acting, and her long career included roles in General Hospital (1973-75), Yes Minister (1981) and Ken Loach’s film Ladybird Ladybird (1994), as well as her eight-year stint in Terry and June (1979-87).
Rosie married my father, Bill Bain, a television director, in 1968. We lived first in Ham, south-west London, then in nearby Twickenham, where my mother would collect me and my brother from primary school, play football with us and teach us to ride bicycles. After Bill died of cancer in 1982, she worked hard to bring us up on her own, moving the family to Mortlake so we could be close to our school in Barnes.
A happy marriage in 1997 to Desmond Bird gave Rosie a new lease of life. They set up home together in Beckenham, Kent, and she gained a degree in literature and history from the Open University. An active Lib Dem, Rosie was a founder member of their humanist and secularist group.
She is remembered with enormous affection for her feisty intelligence, warmth, enthusiasm and great sense of humour.
A first marriage to Edward Fosh ended in divorce. Desmond died in 2001. Rosie is survived by her two sons, Matthew and me, and Robbie.