Rose Hill

Rose Lilian Hill, actress: born London 5 June 1914; married John St Leger Davis (died 1985; one son); died Hillingdon, Middlesex 22 December 2003.

Whenever a radio message was coming through from an agent in the French wartime resistance comedy 'Allo 'Allo, the bedknobs would light up on the bed of the frail, elderly Fanny La Fan, played by Rose Hill. "The flashing knobs!" she would shout, bemused. The old lady, adoptive mother of Edith Artois, was bedridden, so her room was a convenient spot for the Resistance to place the radio, which had a speaker hidden in her chamber pot.

However, the former Folies Bergère dancer took the occasional opportunity to leave the bedroom above her son-in-law René's café, and get about in her motorised wheelchair. She also enjoyed being reunited with her one-time love Roger Leclerc when he arrived at the café after being sprung from prison to forge documents for two British airmen being sheltered there.

Rose Hill was almost 70 when she started playing Fanny and continued through the entire, 10-year run of 'Allo 'Allo. It made her a household face, if not name.

Born in London in 1914, Hill won a scholarship to train at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama, and began her career as an opera singer, making her début at Glyndebourne, before joining the Sadler's Wells Opera company. She gained acting experience on stage at the Royal Court Theatre and appeared in the West End in Four to the Bar (Criterion Theatre), The Diary of a Nobody (Arts Theatre) and Separate Tables (Apollo Theatre).

Having already acted in the film The Bank Raiders (1958), Hill used her singing talents to play a soprano in Peter Sellers's second Pink Panther picture, A Shot in the Dark (1964). Subsequent bit-parts on screen came with credits such as "Shopping Woman" in Every Home Should Have One (1970), "Third Mourner" in For the Love of Ada (1972), "Prim Woman" in Tiffany Jones (1973) and "Henry's Wife" in House of Whipcord (1974). She also played Miss Martingale in The Wildcats of St Trinian's (1980), a feeble attempt to revive the comic schoolgirl films of the 1950s and 1960s.

Similarly, on television, Hill had character roles in episodes of series such as Steptoe and Son (1965), Dad's Army (1970) and Happy Ever After (1976) but, several times, she broke out to win starring parts. She and Stanley Holloway played Fay and Bob Bridge in the television sitcom Thingumybob (1968), made by LWT and transmitted during its first evening as the weekend ITV franchise holder for London. The gentle comedy, written by Kenneth Cope and featuring theme music by Paul McCartney, centred around Bob's life in retirement. John Junkin and Kate Williams played their neighbours.

Later, in Born and Bred (1978, 1980), Hill acted Annie, matriarch of the Benge family, who had devoted her life to caring for sick and stray animals. The writer Douglas Livingstone's comedy drama found black humour in the antics of two south London families, with the entertainer Max Wall playing Tommy, head of the Tonsleys. Also featured were Joan Sims as a merry widow pub landlady and Gorden Kaye as Annie's son Ray.

Hill was then cast as Kaye's mother-in-law when the BBC launched 'Allo 'Allo with a pilot episode in 1982. The comedy, created by Jeremy Lloyd and David Croft, was a spoof on the 1970s drama series Secret Army, about the rescue of Allied airmen from occupied Belgium during the Second World War. Set around a café in France owned by René Artois (Kaye), the sitcom became a series (1984-92) and was a hotbed of innuendo and double entendre.

Much of the cloak-and-dagger action took place around Fanny. Once, the airmen, disguised as nuns, were hidden in the attic above her room; another time, they were dressed as old biddies in her bed. Fanny's wheelchair and bed were also used as hiding places for various appliances, including a stolen lawnmower motor intended to power an old plane earmarked for the airmen's escape.

On arriving at the café, Monsieur Leclerc (Jack Haig) discovered that Fanny was his long-lost childhood sweetheart. Haig and Hill enjoyed many on-screen adventures together. Following his death, Derek Royle, and then Robin Parkinson, joined the 'Allo 'Allo cast as Roger Leclerc's brother Ernest, whom Fanny married, but not before her daughter, Edith, asked: "Mama, when will the happy event take place?" To which Fanny replied: "As soon as possible after we are married - what a stupid question!" Too weak to walk to church for the wedding ceremony, Fanny was pulled down the aisle in her bed by the café waitresses Mimi (Sue Hodge) and Yvette (Vicki Michelle), Edith and two bridesmaids - the airmen in disguise.

On stage, Hill acted at the Royal Court Theatre, in The Old Ones, Objections to Sex and Violence, Endgame and Footfalls. With the Royal Shakespeare Company, she played Anfisa in The Three Sisters and took the roles of Miss La Creevy, the Lady from Downstairs and Mrs Gruden in its acclaimed London and Broadway productions of The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby, a nine-hour performance that was screened on television in 1982 during Channel Four's opening weeks.

The director Peter Wood's National Theatre production of On the Razzle, in which Hill played Fräulein Blumenblatt, was also shown on television, in 1986.

Anthony Hayward