Pamela Cundell: Vivacious actress, singer and comedian who became best-known as the matronly Mrs Fox in Dad's Army

Cundell spent half her career playing warm-hearted senior citizens with a hint of mischief about them

Cundell with John Le Mesurier, right, and Clive Dunn in the final episode of ‘Dad’s Army’, in which her character marries Dunn’s Corporal Jones (BBC)

Television has always loved old ladies – on game shows, in sitcoms, giving vox pops or even, on occasion, starring in meaty dramas. Among the many granny-faced actresses to have been on the carousel over the years, from Betty Woolfe to Irene Handl, one of the most prolific and delightful was Pamela Cundell, who has died at the age of 95 – and who, with her sprightly demeanour and chorus-girl vivacity, spent half her career playing warm-hearted senior citizens with a hint of mischief about them.

She was best known on television for her regular appearances as the spoony, matronly-built Mrs Fox in Dad's Army, smothering American soldiers with her affections and flirting her way into getting an extra sausage off the ration from the meek butcher Corporal Jones (Clive Dunn). Cundell's character eventually married Jones in the final episode, in which she revealed that the lordly wedding cake, just as he was about to cut it, was in fact made of cardboard. She then lifted it up to reveal a rather sorry-looking sponge, cheerfully announcing, "There is a war on, you know!"

Full of life, and habitually bursting into rehearsals with a flourishing "hello darlings!", Pamela Cundell's music-hall sense of showmanship cast her first and foremost as a comedy player, though inevitably in a career so long she made regular appearances in serious pieces – most joltingly as Mrs Bates in a production of Dennis Potter's Brimstone and Treacle at the Haymarket Studio, Leicester in 1979. It was tricksy casting, since the play is set in a kind of septic sitcom-land, something that the 1976 BBC production, at the time still the subject of a broadcast ban, also acknowledged.

Pamela Isabel Cundell, said to be a descendent of Henry Condell, a manager of the Lord Chamberlain's Men, Shakespeare's playing company, was born in Croydon, Surrey in 1920. Her parents, builder Howard and opera singer Elsie, were Gilbert and Sullivan devotees, and Cundell was onstage from an early age in chorus lines. After studying at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama she worked in rep and in variety, becoming a regular in summer seasons as a member of Cecil Johnson's Entertainers. In the final days of music hall she appeared as a singer and comedian alongside such stars as Jimmy Jewel, Terry Scott and Sid Millward and His Nitwits. Throughout the 1950s, alongside Dick Emery, she was a regular on BBC Radio's Workers' Playtime.

She appeared regularly in seaside revues such as Between Ourselves, which toured the east coast in 1955, and began her association with the gloriously bovine Bill Fraser, through whom she made her first television appearances in 1961 in the sitcom Bootsie and Snudge, a civvy street spin-off from The Army Game that starred Fraser and Alfie Bass. Fraser spent the final six years of his life with her by becoming her third husband in 1981.

Back on stage, in 1965 she played the Queen in John Dalby's musical The Rose and the Ring, the first Christmas production at the recently opened Yvonne Arnaud Theatre in Guildford. Other stage highlights included a revival of Gerald Savory's George and Margaret at the Ashcroft Theatre, Croydon in 1982, in which she played the maid – a part that Irene Handl had played in the film 42 years earlier.

But she was most often to be found on television, whether playing washerwomen and gossipy housewives, or appearing with Benny Hill or Frankie Howerd. She had a brief stint in EastEnders in 2005, and popped up occasionally in films, such as Shane Meadows' 24/7 (1997).

In an early episode of In Sickness and in Health (1985), an ill-advised follow-up to Till Death Us Do Part, half the running time was given over to a scene of the cast sitting in a pub reminiscing on funerals they have known and loved, enjoyable for the sheer authenticity of it, with Cundell absolutely spot-on as the nostalgic East End matriarch, instantly someone's Auntie Flo. Her best role on television was in the admired BBC series Big Deal (1984), in which she was mother to Ray Brooks' ever-cheerful compulsive gambler Robbie Box, who was forever breezing in to greet her with a kiss and the line, "wotcha, Sexpot".

There are now only two members of the regular cast of Dad's Army still alive. As well as appearing in 13 episodes of the series, she appeared in the stage adaptation at the Shaftesbury Theatre in 1975 – but most significantly, she kept the jollies up through the poignant final episode, which ended with a sweet tribute to the real Home Guard, and which now can also be seen as a send-off to a breed of actor and a breed of gentle comedy which we won't see the likes of again.

SIMON FARQUHAR

Pamela Cundell, actress, singer and comedian: born Croydon 15 January 1920; married 1948 Robert O'Connor (marriage dissolved), 1955 Leslie Newport-Gwilt (marriage dissolved, one daughter), 1981 Bill Fraser (died 1987); died 14 February 2015.