Dame June Whitfield: Comedy actor who was a familiar face to generations of TV fans

Actor whose long and successful comedy career took in hit sitcom 'Terry and June' and cult favourite 'Absolutely Fabulous'

Dame June Whitfield, who has died aged 93, was a familiar face to generations of television viewers who worked with comedy greats such as Jimmy Edwards, Arthur Askey, Tony Hancock, Benny Hill, Peter Sellers, Spike Milligan and Frankie Howerd.

She achieved her biggest fame as the long-suffering wife of Terry Scott’s childlike husband in two very BBC, middle-class, Middle England sitcoms. The pair’s screen partnership had begun in the sketch show Scott On… (1968-74), which featured a different theme each week.

After one marriage proved particularly popular, the writers John Chapman and Eric Merriman created Happy Ever After (1974-79) for Scott and Whitfield as Terry and June Fletcher, a middle-aged couple facing empty nest syndrome. She was seen sorting out Terry’s problems and popping his bubble when he was prone to pomposity. However, any hope of living alone together in domestic bliss disappeared with the arrival of June’s Aunt Lucy (played by Beryl Cooke) and her talking mynah bird.

Chapman left after four series and Merriman carried on for a further run but then felt the comedy had run its course. When he refused to waive his rights to the format, the BBC kept the Scott-Whitfield partnership going in a new sitcom, Terry and June (1979-87), using some of the previous scriptwriting team.

Like the original, it was a cosy suburban comedy that cemented Whitfield in the public imagination as the slightly prim but in command, stay-at-home wife. The premise was much the same as before, but the couple were now called Terry and June Medford, and there was no aunt or mynah bird.

Before her pairing with Scott, Whitfield – whose stage, radio and screen career started in the 1940s – had already marked out a place for herself in the annals of television comedy by playing the nurse in the classic 1961 Hancock episode “The Blood Donor”.

Later, she left behind the blandness for which some criticised her programmes with Scott by joining Absolutely Fabulous (1992-6, 2001-4) as ditzy June, mother of the PR guru Edina Monsoon (Jennifer Saunders), whose drink and drugs excesses were matched only by those of her promiscuous magazine editor friend, Patsy Stone (Joanna Lumley). Two decades after it began, the cast were reunited for three specials (2011-12).

Again, Whitfield was cast after appearing with one of the sitcom’s stars in a sketch show, French and Saunders (1988). “Jennifer fleshed out the character of Mother… and soon she emerged as more than a merely disapproving presence and became slightly unhinged,” the actor wrote in her 2000 autobiography …and June Whitfield. (The book’s title demonstrated how she happily accepted her usual billing. “Playing second fiddle has kept me going into the third millennium,” she wrote, also recalling that Roy Hudd christened her “The Comics’ Tart”.)

Whitfield was born in Streatham, south London, and her father, John, ran a family company, Dictograph Internal Telephones. He and his wife, Bertha (née Flett), a former Admiralty draughtswoman, enjoyed performing in amateur dramatics.

​From the age of three, Whitfield took ballet and tap lessons at the Robinson School of Dancing, Elocution, Pianoforte and Singing. She made her acting debut, aged five, as a boy in an amateur production of Charles Russ’s play Hidden Power. At the age of 13, she played her real father’s schoolgirl daughter in Ian Hay’s Housemaster with the Comedy Club – of which her parents were long-time members – at the Cripplegate Theatre, in the City of London.

Whitfield’s education at Streatham Hill High School was ended by the Second World War. Evacuated to Bognor Regis, West Sussex, she attended St Michael’s School. When it relocated to Penzance, Cornwall, she went with it before her family briefly moved to her father’s home town, Huddersfield, in West Yorkshire, where she learned typing and bookkeeping at Kaye’s College. On returning to London in 1941, Whitfield completed her secretarial studies at Pitman’s College, Brixton Hill, and continued acting with the Comedy Club and the Belfrie Players.

She then successfully auditioned to train at RADA (1942-4), alongside Richard Attenborough, Bryan Forbes and Miriam Karlin. One of her teachers, David Horne, gave her a job as assistant stage manager in a West End production, Pink String and Sealing Wax (Duke of York’s Theatre, 1944)

On leaving drama school, she made her professional acting debut as Margaret in the JM Barrie play Dear Brutus (Q Theatre, Kew, 1944). Her West End parts included Sunny Claire in Noël Coward’s Ace of Clubs (Cambridge Theatre, 1950), Ensign Sue Jaeger in South Pacific (Drury Lane Theatre, 1951) and Sally McBride, followed by the lead role in Love from Judy (Saville Theatre, 1952-3).

There were also small parts in the films Quiet Weekend (1946, as a dancer) and The 20 Questions Murder Mystery (1950). But radio comedy, which was in its heyday, gave Whitfield the breakthrough that would provide her with such a long career. In 1953, she took over from Joy Nichols in the sketch show Take It from Here, written by Frank Muir and Denis Norden. She became best known as Eth, the dowdy long-term fiancée of gormless Ron (Dick Bentley) in The Glums segment – the writers’ revolt against cosy radio sitcom families such as the Dales and the Huggetts – with Jimmy Edwards as Ron’s boorish father, Mr Glum. “Ooh, Ron,” Whitfield whined through 153 episodes of the programme, which continued until 1960.

Its popularity resulted in her being cast in dozens of other radio comedy shows – and on television, where she made her first impact in Fast and Loose (1954-5), a sketch show written by its stars, Bob Monkhouse and Denis Goodwin. She also appeared on the small screen with other radio stars – Arthur Askey in Before Your Very Eyes (1955-7), Arthur’s Treasured Volumes (1960) and The Arthur Askey Show (1961), and the Goons in The Idiot Weekly, Price 2d (1956) and Yes, It’s the Cathode-Ray Tube Show! (1957).

Whitfield was also seen with Tony Hancock in The Tony Hancock Show (1956-7), Hancock’s Half Hour (1957), Hancock (1961) and Hancock’s (1967), and with three of television’s most popular comedians in The Benny Hill Show (1961-8), Frankie Howerd (1966) and The Dick Emery Show (1969-74).

In sitcoms, Whitfield was reunited with Jimmy Edwards when she took a variety of roles in Whack-O! (1958-9), The Seven Faces of Jim (1961), Six More Faces of Jim (1962) and More Faces of Jim (1963).

Co-stars Terry Scott and June Whitfield in 1976 (PA)

She also played cash-strapped Rose Garvey, married to Gerald (Peter Jones, later Desmond Walter-Ellis) and living next door to her well-off sister and brother-in-law, Lana and Harry Butt (Pat Coombs and Reg Varney), in Beggar My Neighbour (1966-8) and Mabel, fiancée of Harry H Corbett’s commitment-phobe sales rep, in The Best Things in Life (1969-70).

Later, she acted a housekeeper in a 1998 episode of the American sitcom Friends, Nelly in Last of the Summer Wine (2005-10) and Joan, Stephanie Beacham’s cantankerous, wheelchair-bound but fiercely independent mother, in Boomers (2014).

Rare straight roles came in The Pallisers (1974, as Mrs Bonteen), Minder (1984) and Doctor Who (as Minnie Hooper, a member of the Silver Cloak pensioners’ group, 2009-10).

Film appearances were rare, too, but Whitfield was in four Carry Ons – as Leslie Phillips’s girlfriend in Nurse (1959), a wife losing her inhibitions in Abroad (1972), a women’s libber in Girls (1973) and Queen Isabella in Columbus (1992). She was also in a big-screen version of Bless This House (1972, with Terry Scott as her husband) and played Aunt Drusilla in Jude (1996).

Whitfield, who had a talent for different voices, remained committed to radio throughout her career. Her longest run was as Roy Hudd’s versatile sidekick in the weekly satirical show The News Huddlines (1984-2000), in which she did a memorable Margaret Thatcher impersonation. She also played Miss Marple in BBC radio dramatisations (1993-2001) of all the novels featuring the Agatha Christie character.

The actor, who was made a Freeman of the City of London in 1982, won a British Comedy Awards Lifetime Achievement Award in 1994 and was inducted into the RTS Hall of Fame in 1999.

In a recent radio interview Dame June had said there was too much sex and swearing on modern TV. She said: “Where’s the humour gone? You can’t really get a good laugh from television.”

She also revealed she was suffering from ill health, joking that she could probably only play the role of someone “in bed going to sleep”.

In 1955, Whitfield married Tim Aitchison, a chartered surveyor, who died in 2001. They are survived by their daughter, Suzy Aitchison.

Dame June Rosemary Whitfield, actor, born 11 November 1925, died 28 December 2018