Cheryl Hall, who has died aged 76, was an actor best known for her roles in 1970s sitcoms. As Shirley Johnson in Citizen Smith, she was the girlfriend of Wolfie, the would-be revolutionary leading the Tooting Popular Front with the battle cry “power to the people”.
Wolfie Smith, played by Hall’s then husband, the actor Robert Lindsay, and his small “army” of self-styled urban guerrillas, are simply inept, concocting plans such as stealing a Scorpion tank in order to mount an attack on the House of Commons, only to discover that parliament is in recess.
Nevertheless, Shirley supports her boyfriend’s ideals while wishing they could settle down together in something resembling her parents’ middle-class lifestyle. Her father, initially played by Artro Morris, and then by Peter Vaughan, is less damning of Wolfie’s Marxist revolutionary politics than of his unemployed status and unkempt hair.
The sitcom, beginning in 1977, was written by John Sullivan shortly before he created Derek “Del Boy” Trotter, another south London antihero, in Only Fools and Horses. Citizen Smith ran for four series, finishing in 1980, but Hall left at the end of the second run in 1979, reportedly frustrated at her character’s lack of comic dialogue.
Although it did not help Hall’s career, Sullivan later admitted that she was right to be dissatisfied with her Citizen Smith role, and went on to prove he could write comedy for female characters with Just Good Friends (1983-86).
Hall’s departure also coincided with the end of her marriage, and she and Lindsay divorced in 1980. Later, in a 2022 interview with Zoe Williams in the Guardian, Lindsay said it was a result of his obsession with achieving success. “That single-mindedness broke up my first marriage,” he said.
Hall was born in Whitechapel, east London, to Lilian (nee Cole), a civil servant at the Royal Courts of Justice, and George Hall, a woodworker and market trader. She was brought up in Bethnal Green and attended Coborn school for girls, Bow, where she appeared in school plays.
While studying at the Corona Theatre School in London, she worked as a cleaner to supplement her grant. One day, she glanced up from her work and saw Stewart Granger, the British Hollywood film star, looking down at her. “Starstruck is the only way to describe how I felt,” she recalled. “But, when he heard that I was a drama student, he made me some tea and spent the rest of the afternoon talking about acting.”
Her early stage appearances included the role of Helen, a schoolgirl, in a 1971 revival of Barry Reckord’s groundbreaking drama Skyvvers, set in a London comprehensive, at the Royal Court’s Theatre Upstairs.
She was already in demand on television by then. Between 1968 and 1971, she appeared as a jobseeker in the ITV schools series You and the World. Then came roles in both dramas and comedies, from Special Branch (in 1969) and On the Buses (in 1971) to Callan (two parts, in 1970 and 1972), Sykes (in 1972) and Albert (also 1972), in which she played Doreen Bissel, the fiancee of Rodney Bewes’s factory worker of the title.
Hall lost out to Katy Manning for the part of the Doctor Who companion Jo Grant, alongside Jon Pertwee, but the programme’s producer, Barry Letts, gave her a guest role as Shirna, the assistant to a travelling showman, who rescues Jo in the 1973 adventure Carnival of Monsters. A year later, in the prison drama Within These Walls, Hall played an inmate in the drugs unit.
Back in sitcoms, she played Sid James’s secretary in 1974 episodes of Bless This House, then Kathleen, the girlfriend of a shy plumber, Shorty Mepstead (David Jason), who lives with his mother, in both series of Lucky Feller (1975-76). As Shorty’s girlfriend, she also has eyes for his elder, more worldly-wise, brother, Randolph (Peter Armitage ), and at one stage fears she is pregnant by him.
Hall’s other roles, in a television career in which she clocked up almost 100 parts in 40 years, included Mrs Jackson in the children’s foster home series Dodger, Bonzo & the Rest (1985); a short run in EastEnders (1988) as Christine, who provided a safe house to Den Watts (Leslie Grantham) – and was seduced by him – when he was on the run from the police; and seven different characters in The Bill (between 1984 and 2007).
Although she kept busy, starring roles remained elusive and Hall was able to focus on her interest in local politics. In 1993, she ousted a sitting Conservative on Kent county council to give Labour its first win in the Ramsgate South ward. She eventually became leader of the party’s group, in opposition, on the council.
At the 1997 election she stood as a parliamentary candidate for Canterbury. Although she gained 31% of the vote, the Conservative MP retained the seat. She lost her county council seat in 2001 and, from 2010, spent much of her retirement in Greece.
Before her marriage to Lindsay (1974-80), Hall was in a three-year relationship with the actor Robin Askwith. In 1985, she married Robert Potter; they divorced four years later. She is survived by their sons, Benjamin and Joshua.
• Cheryl Georgette Hall, actor, born 23 July 1950; died 9 August 2026
