The actor Judy Loe, who has died aged 78 after suffering from cancer, graduated from children’s television to popular dramas such as The Chief and Casualty – but she never escaped the tag of being the widow of Richard Beckinsale, the British comedy actor remembered for his roles in Rising Damp and Porridge. “I get annoyed at being continually presented as the brave little widow having a tough time,” she said in 1987, eight years after his death at 31 from a heart attack.
Their daughter, Kate Beckinsale, went on to become a Hollywood star, while Loe enjoyed a satisfying career on British television. She was settling down to a new life with the director Roy Battersby and looking to the future when she landed one of her best roles, in the seven-part romantic drama Yesterday’s Dreams (1987). As a divorcee in a new relationship with a mechanic, she is still being wooed by her former husband, a high-powered business executive. Her character, Diane, eventually decides to leave the past behind.
Loe was also firmly fixed on the future, although she did not forget happy times with Beckinsale and their daughter. “We have striven towards the right balance, a way of keeping Richard still in our hearts while carrying on with our lives,” she told the TV Times magazine.
Just five years after Beckinsale’s death, memories were stirred when Loe starred in the writer Roger Marshall’s drama serial Missing from Home (1984) as a mother-of-two who has to cope after her husband suddenly disappears.
Her television breakthrough had come in 1970 in ITV’s children’s fantasy drama Ace of Wands, starring Michael MacKenzie as Tarot, a magician who uses his supernatural powers to defeat evil-doers from art thieves to Nazis. She appeared in the first two series as his stage assistant, Lulli (Lillian) Palmer, a telepathic orphan who communicates with him over long distances. Trevor Preston, who later created Out and Fox – hard-hitting dramas featuring those on the wrong side of the law – devised Ace of Wands as a crime series for children, although Loe later said that she regarded her role as largely “decorative … always having to be rescued by the man”.
In the sitcom Goodnight and God Bless (1983), she was Celia Kemp, the neglected wife who hates the TV game shows hosted by her husband, Ronnie (Donald Churchill), who is not so genial off screen. It ran for only one series.
A more rewarding comedy role came in Singles (1988-91), in which she played the recently separated Pam, perennially chased by men. Eric Chappell and Jean Warr’s sitcom of intrigue, lies and deception also starred Roger Rees (later replaced by Simon Cadell), Susie Blake and Eamon Boland as the other singletons embarking on relationships.
For the first three series of the drama The Chief (1990-92), Loe played Elizabeth Stafford, the GP wife of the fictional Eastland force chief constable (Tim Pigott-Smith) battling the Home Office and local bureaucracy. As Commander Kathryn McTiernan, in charge of a multinational crew, she headed the cast in the Sky sci-fi series Space Island One (1998).
Then, in 2001-02, she was a semi-regular in the long-running hospital drama Casualty. She played Jan Goddard, who falls for the nurse Charlie Fairhead (Derek Thompson) – “a strong, intelligent woman” attracted to him “because of his sincerity and vulnerability”, she explained – then becomes his boss as chief executive officer of Holby city hospital. Loe took her character to the Casualty spin-off Holby City (2002-03), with the action focused on surgical wards rather than A&E.
Born in Manchester, she was the daughter of Nancy (nee Jones), a department store assistant, and Norman Loe, a travelling sales rep, and attended Urmston grammar school. After gaining a degree in English and drama from Birmingham University, she acted in repertory theatre in Crewe (1968-69) – where she met Beckinsale – then Chester (1969).
She made her West End debut with a nine-month run (1969-70) in the counterculture hippy musical Hair. It was able to open at the Shaftesbury theatre in 1968, with the cast completely nude in one scene, after the abolition of theatre censorship in Britain. Pointing out that the daring scene lasted only 10 seconds, Loe told the Liverpool Echo that the production was “neither titillating nor outrageous”, adding: “In the context of this show, it seems the natural thing to do.”
From there, she made her television debut in Ace of Wands, and moved straight to peak-time drama with Man of Straw, starring Derek Jacobi in a 1972 adaptation of Heinrich Mann’s early 20th-century novel prophesying German military ambitions. Loe then played Alice Lee in the BBC’s 1973 Sunday teatime serialisation of the Walter Scott novel Woodstock, and Princess Mary of Teck (later George V’s queen consort) in ITV’s 1975 13-part period drama Edward the Seventh.
As she became an established character actor, she switched effortlessly from comedy (Robin’s Nest, Ripping Yarns and The Upchat Line, all in 1977) to drama (When the Boat Comes In in 1981, The Gentle Touch from 1980 to 1981, and Boon in 1990). Her later television roles included Jessica Rattigan, the manipulative wife of the Anglican bishop in the late-night ITV soap Revelations (1994-95), co-created by Russell T Davies, and Adele Cecil, a singing teacher who comes closer than most women to sweeping John Thaw’s Oxford detective off his feet in Inspector Morse (1997-98). Loe’s last television appearance came in Fool Me Once (2024).
She married Beckinsale in 1977, two years before his death. In 1997, she married Battersby after they had been together for 15 years; he died in 2024. She is survived by Kate and by six stepchildren: the actor Samantha Beckinsale from her first marriage, and Ben, Frank, Anna, Tom and Will with Battersby.
• Judy (Judith Margaret) Loe, actor, born 6 March 1947; died 15 July 2025
