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

The news was announced by her daughter, Emma Freud, who wrote: “My beautiful 98-year-old mum has taken her final bow. After a loving evening – where we knew she was on her way – surrounded by children, grandchildren and pizza, she told us all to fuck off so she could go to sleep. And then she never woke up. Her final words were ‘I love you’.”

Emma Freud noted her mother’s last film role, as the Downing Street housekeeper in Love Actually – written and directed by her son-in-law, Richard Curtis – as well as the 30 years she spent running repertory theatre companies in Suffolk, “employing hundreds of actors who loved her for her passion, he

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