Veteran stage and screen actor who played Ivy in ‘Last of the Summer Wine’

For 37 years Jane Freeman, who has died aged 81, was known to millions as the opinionated cafe owner Ivy in the long-running BBC TV comedy Last of the Summer Wine. She won the part through her performance as the seaside landlady who swung between aggression and ingratiation in the 1972 TV version of Peter Terson's radio play The Fishing Party. Ivy's husband, Sid, was also imported from that production, in the form of John Comer.

For them the series’ writer Roy Clarke created scenes that, while more varied and subtle, recalled the world of McGill’s seaside postcards; Ivy was like the northern women depicted by the comedian Les Dawson. Comer’s death in 1984 robbed Ivy of marital sparring, but she retained her bite. Affronted when Kathy Staff’s Nora Batty found ants under a table, she declared: “The only pests we get in here are customers.” And, remembering Sid, she declared to Thora Hird’s Edie Pegden: “Of all the gifts you can be born with, perhaps the most precious you can hope for in a man is a low IQ.”

Last of the Summer Wine, combined with further television jobs for The Fishing Party's director Michael Simpson, who Jane married in 1971, enabled the couple to buy and renovate a Cotswolds cottage. They would return there, however briefly, when separated by their work – he as a TV producer; she, when Last of the Summer Wine, Crossroads and Within These Walls allowed. She also toured in the 1991 revival of the 1950s play Sailor Beware! as the formidable Emma Hornett.

In a profession that often required many names, Jane made a good start. Born Shirley Ann in London to Arthur Pithers, a railway engineer, and his wife, Joan (nee Dewhurst), she was considered by her family to be “very spirited as a youngster, joining the Brentford boys in their spitting competitions”. With her father’s early death in an accident on the London Underground and her mother’s remarriage and move to south Wales, she shook off the Shirley Ann, adopted the surname of her stepfather, Russell Evans, a solicitor, and became Jane Evans. No one in the family can say why she then switched to Freeman when in 1955 she graduated from Cardiff College of Music and Drama (now the Royal Welsh College of Music & Drama), embarking on a career, which, for a while, seemed unlikely to flourish. But then came an offer of work with the Osiris Players, a company of seven women, founded by Nancy Hewins in 1927.

In her 18 months with Osiris, Jane played around 40 parts in roughly 1,000 performances. There followed a dozen years in which, with weeks on the dole, she worked off and on with several companies until, in 1967, at the invitation of the director Peter Dews, she embarked on the first of several seasons with the Birmingham repertory company.

With the success of Last of the Summer Wine, she appealed to both stage and TV audiences. In Keith Waterhouse and Willis Hall's Worzel Gummidge – The Musical (1980, then touring), she joined the TV show's stars Una Stubbs and Jon Pertwee. She appeared in the 1983 Blackadder pilot series, The Black Adder, as the peasant woman Tully Applebottom.

Later in the decade came a run of pantomimes with the comedian Max Boyce, in which, far from the character of Ivy, she delighted huge audiences as Fairy Queen. Her last stage role, in 1992, came in Chatsky, Anthony Burgess's version of a satirical verse comedy by Alexander Griboyedov, Woe From Wit.

After Simpson’s death in 2007 Jane continued to work, despite suffering a neurological condition that affected her hands and feet.

She is survived by her half-brother, two nephews and three nieces.

( Guardian News and Media 2017)