Jill Freud, Love Actually actress and inspiration for Lucy in the Narnia books, dies at the age of 98. Film

Jill Freud, the theater star who was also the inspiration for the character of Lucy in CS Lewis’s The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, has died at the age of 98.

Her daughter, Emma Freud, announced the news, writing: “My beautiful 98-year-old mother bowed for the last time. After a loving evening – as we knew she was on her way – surrounded by children, grandchildren and pizza, she asked us all to turn away so she could sleep. And then she never woke up. Her last words were ‘I love you.'”

Emma Freud pointed to her mother’s recent film role, as a Downing Street housekeeper in Love Actually – written and directed by her brother-in-law Richard Curtis – as well as the 30 years she spent running theater companies in Suffolk, “employing hundreds of actors who loved her for her passion, her care, her shepherd’s pie, her dedication to regional theater and her commitment to actors’ rights”.

She added that her mother “ate the same lunch every day – a glass of red wine and a packet of potato chips,” and during Covid, the 93-year-old, who was cooped up with three other Freudian daughters, took part in a class every morning.

“She was 98 years old, mother of five, grandmother of 17, great-grandmother of seven – feisty, sassy, ​​kind, loving and mischievous. Very lucky to have such a dazzling newcomer.”

Born June Flewitt in London in 1927, she was evacuated as a young teenager to Oxford and eventually worked as a housekeeper at Kilns, the home Lewis shared with his brother Warnie, his adoptive mother and potential partner Janie Moore.

Speaking to the Daily Telegraph in 2005, she recalled knowing that her first meeting with Lewis was “something momentous” and admitted she had a “schoolgirl crush”.

“He looked like a red-cheeked farmer: heavy jaw, cane, tweed, big boots, Labrador, tall—well, tall for me. I thought he was wonderful.”

In a letter to Flewitt’s mother in 1945, two years after her daughter began living with them, Lewis wrote: “I have never met anything like her unselfishness, patience, and kindness, and I will feel deeply in her debt all my life.”

And I remembered the huge cupboard in the basement at Kilns, believed to be the original wardrobe into which the brave and inquisitive Lucy – the youngest and most gentle of the four children evacuated to stay with a professor during the war – had climbed to discover Narnia in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe.

Lewis sent her the book after its publication, but she did not learn of her direct involvement in it until after his death, when Douglas Gresham, Joy’s son, the American academic Lewis married in 1956, wrote to her: “I suppose you know that you are the prototype for Lucy.”

Lewis paid for her scholarship to Rada, which she deferred for two years until she was 18, in order to better care for the writer and Moore when she fell ill due to ill health.

After graduating, she adopted the stage name Jill Raymond and quickly progressed to the West End, where she starred opposite the likes of Michael Redgrave and won roles in TV shows such as Torchy, the Battery Boy.

In 1950, she married Chef Clement Freud, grandson of Sigmund Freud, with whom she had five children, including Emma, ​​who became a screenwriter, and Matthew, a public relations executive and president of Freud Communications.

In the 1970s, her husband became a Liberal MP and his wife helped canvass for votes, while also participating in radio programmes. He later moved into broadcasting, while she founded her own Suffolk-based theater company, Jill Freud & Company, in 1980, and had a recurring role on the TV show Crown Court.

Nine years ago, ITV broadcast a documentary in which three women claimed that Clement Freud, who died in 2009, sexually abused them when they were young women and, in one case, as children.

After watching the film, his widow said she was “shocked, deeply saddened and deeply sorry for what happened to these women… and I sincerely hope they now feel some peace.”

When asked in 2014 if she had felt overshadowed by her children and husband, she said: “It used to bother me a little bit, but I think it’s funny now that you often see Freud’s lineage printed without knowing that any of them had a mother. I never mentioned that.”

“They were all born without a mother. I think our children were lucky because not only did they get Freud’s highly sensitive, neurotic, highly intelligent genes, they also got my genes.”