Lady Jill Freud, who appeared in Love Actually and inspired the character of Lucy in CS Lewis’s Narnia books, has died aged 98.
The news was announced by her daughter Emma, the broadcaster and writer who is married to director Richard Curtis, 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 f*** off so she could go to sleep. And then she never woke up. Her final words were ‘I love you’.”
Freud, an actor born June Flewett, had an illustrious career, performing on stage and screen since the 1950s after training at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art (RADA).
After graduating, she changed her name to Jill Raymond, but became Jill Freud after marrying broadcaster-turned-Liberal MP Clement Freud, the grandson of Sigmund Freud, in 1950. The couple had five children.
Freud also ran two repertory theatre companies in Suffolk – the Jill Freud and Company and Southwold Summer Theatre – for three decades, where she produced and directed numerous plays.
In 2004, she discovered she was the inspiration behind the character Lucy Pevensie in CS Lewis’s The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, after being told so by the author’s stepson, Douglas Gresham.
Before her career, when Freud was 16, she was evacuated to Oxford to escape the Blitz during the Second World War, where she ended up living with Lewis and his partner Jane Moore for two years.
Whilst there, she would often encounter Lewis’s friend, the Hobbit and Lord of the Rings author JRR Tolkien.
Lewis was so taken by his tenant that he wrote in a letter to Freud’s mother: “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.”
Freud told The Hollywood Reporter of her discovery that she was based on Lucy: “I was absolutely thrilled. It’s like being told you were the real Lady Macbeth!”
She added that she found the character she’d inspired “very likeable”, which she said was “quite flattering”.
"It's years since I read it, but in the stage version I saw a few years ago, Lucy was very likeable – it was quite flattering," she reflected about seeing the character inspired by her younger self.
It was Lewis who paid Freud’s fees to study at RADA.
Freud was also a force in discovering talent and, while running her theatres, employed 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”.
It was her work as theatre director for which she received an Honorary Doctorate in Civil Law from the University of East Anglia in 2021.
Her screen credits included Jack Lee's The Woman in the Hall (1947) and TV shows Crown Court and Maigret.
Her last movie role was playing Pat, the housekeeper at Downing Street, in her son-in-law Richard Curtis’s 2003 film Love Actually, in which she shared scenes with Hugh Grant and Martine McCutcheon.
In a tribute to her mother, Emma added: “She had the same lunch every day – a glass of red wine and a packet of crisps, and during Covid, aged 93, locked up with 3 other Freud gals, she took part in a tap class every morning.
“She was 98, mother of 5, grandmother of 17, great grandmother of 7 – she was feisty, outrageous, kind, loving and mischievous. Lucky old heaven getting such a dazzling newcomer. Jill Freud.”
Freud’s husband, Clement, died in 2009, aged 84.
Tributes have been pouring in for Freud, with podcaster Elizabeth Day writing: “What an amazing person. I'm so sorry. Sending love to you all.'
David Baddiel added: “May her memory be a blessing.”
