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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’.”
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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, her care, her shepherd’s pie, her devotion to regional theatre and her commitment to actors’ rights.”
She added that her mother “had the same lunch every day – a glass of red wine and a packet of crisps, and during Covid, aged 93, locked up with three other Freud gals, she took part in a tap class every morning.
“She was 98, mother of five, grandmother of 17, great-grandmother of seven – she was feisty, outrageous, kind, loving and mischievous. Lucky old heaven getting such a dazzling newcomer.”
Born June Flewett in London in 1927, she was evacuated as a young teenager to Oxford and eventually employed as a housekeeper at the Kilns, the house Lewis shared with his brother, Warnie, and adoptive mother and possible partner Janie Moore.
Speaking to the Daily Telegraph in 2005, she recalled knowing her first meeting with Lewis was “something momentous” and confessed to a “schoolgirl crush” on him.
“He looked like a ruddy-cheeked farmer: heavy jowls, stick, tweeds, big shoes, labrador, tall – well, tall to me. I thought he was wonderful.”
In a letter to Flewett’s mother in 1945, two years after her daughter began living with them, Lewis wrote: “I have never really met anything like her unselfishness and patience and kindness and shall feel deeply in her debt as long as I live.”
She recalled the enormous cupboard on the landing at the Kilns, thought to be the original wardrobe into which the brave and curious Lucy – the youngest and kindest of four children who comes as an evacuee to stay with a professor during the war – climbs to discover Narnia in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe.
Lewis sent her the book after publication, but she wasn’t aware of her direct involvement in it until after his death, when Douglas Gresham, the son of Joy, the American academic Lewis married in 1956, wrote to her saying: “I suppose you know you are the prototype for Lucy.”
Lewis had paid for her scholarship to Rada, which she deferred for two years until she was 18, to better care for the writer and Moore when she was laid low through ill-health.
After graduating, she adopted the stage name Jill Raymond and progressed quickly 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 the then-chef Clement Freud, the grandson of Sigmund Freud, with whom she had five children, including Emma, who became a scriptwriter, and Matthew, the PR executive and head of Freud Communications.
In the 1970s, her husband became a Liberal MP and his wife helped in canvass, while also taking part in radio shows. He later moved into broadcasting, while she founded her Suffolk-based theatre company, Jill Freud and Company, in 1980, and had a recurrent role in TV show Crown Court.
Nine years ago, ITV aired a documentary in which three women alleged that Clement Freud, who died in 2009, had sexually assaulted them when they were young women and – in one case – as a child.
After viewing the film, his widow said she was “shocked, deeply saddened and profoundly sorry for what has happened to these women … I sincerely hope they will now have some peace”.
Asked in 2014 whether she ever felt overshadowed by her children and husband, she said: “It used to irk me a bit, but I think it funny now that you quite often see a dynasty of the Freuds printed and you wouldn’t know any of them have a mother. I never get a mention.
“They were all born without a mother. I think our children have been lucky though because they haven’t just got the highly sensitive, neurotic, hugely intelligent Freud genes, they’ve also got mine.”
