Lady Freud, actress wife of Clement Freud and inspiration for Lucy in CS Lewis’s Narnia – obituary

Although Jill Freud gave up her acting career for many years to bring up her five children, in compensation she became the matriarch of a high-achieving dynasty that included Matthew, the PR guru, and Emma, the broadcaster. In 2003 she was cast as the 10 Downing Street housekeeper in the film Love Actually, directed by her daughter Emma’s partner, Richard Curtis.

“I think our children have been lucky because they haven’t just got the highly sensitive, neurotic, hugely intelligent Freud genes, they’ve also got mine,” Jill Freud observed. “I am pretty stable emotionally, you could say boring.” All the Freud children became so successful that Sir Clement once said that he would leave them nothing in his will, on the grounds that his legacies would amount to “what they tip the milkman at Christmas”.

While her husband was preoccupied with his twin roles as curmudgeonly national treasure and Liberal member – she became Lady Freud when he was knighted for political services in 1987 – Jill Freud found fulfilment in middle age running her own summer repertory theatre company near their home in Suffolk. But many commentators suggested that ministering to her famously dyspeptic husband must have been a full-time job in itself.

And yet, for all she softened some of Clement’s sharper edges, Jill Freud did not fit the mould of a meek helpmeet. In 2001 she made headlines when it was revealed that in the 1970s she had embarked on a five-year love affair with a 16-year-old boy, Jonathan Self.