The Malaysian Chinese actor Pik-Sen Lim, who has died of cancer aged 81, was one of the most recognised east Asian faces on British television and, despite being cast in stereotypical roles during her early decades on screen, enjoyed a 60-year career.
Her highest-profile part came as the Chinese student Chung Su-Lee learning English at an adult education college in the ITV series Mind Your Language (1977-79).
For Lim, taking a leading part in a successful sitcom – which attracted up to 18 million viewers – was a double-edged sword. “I was forced to say ‘flom’ instead of ‘from’ and ‘evely’ for ‘every’,” she said. “It was pretty corny. I had to learn pidgin English.”
The programme was broadcast in an era when television sitcom was prone to amplify racial stereotypes. Alongside an Italian chef, Spanish bartender, Greek shipping agency worker, Japanese electronics expert, French au pair, a Sikh, a Muslim and other students of English as a second language, and with Barry Evans starring as Jeremy Brown, their teacher, Su-Lee was the Chinese embassy secretary, a dedicated communist and kung-fu enthusiast, always carrying around Mao Zedong’s Little Red Book and quoting his anti-western sentiments.
Michael Grade, then an ITV executive, commissioned Mind Your Language, but dropped it after three series, admitting it was racist. “It was really irresponsible of us to put it out,” he said. Nevertheless, the sitcom was revived by other executives for a further series in 1986, although Lim did not reprise her role and not all ITV regional companies screened it.
Soap operas had a much better record of representing members of minority-ethnic communities. Shortly after leaving drama school, Lim had an early opportunity to portray what is believed to be the first Chinese nurse on British television. She joined Emergency – Ward 10 in 1964 as Kwei-Kim Yen, a staff nurse at Oxbridge general hospital, who had a relationship with a doctor and stayed until the final episode in 1967.
On leaving the serial, she appeared in the sitcom Sorry I’m Single (1967) as Suzy, a Chinese student from Hong Kong, one of three women living in a bedsit in a converted Hampstead house that was also home to an eternal student played by Derek Nimmo.
Later came regular roles in Spearhead (1978-81) as a soldier’s wife, and the short-lived soap Albion Market (1985-86) as Ly Nhu Chan, a Vietnamese stallholder selling wickerwork and baskets.
She was born Lim Phaik Seng in George Town, Penang (then in British Malaya, and now part of Malaysia), during the second world war when it was occupied by Japanese forces. Her mother, Tan Siew Chin, was from a poor local family, while her father, Lim Cheng Teik, of Chinese origin, owned a successful rice mill.
During her postwar childhood, Lim attended the Light Street convent school, where she was known as “Pixi”, and she was entranced by black-and-white films and visits to Teochew operas. She mounted her own productions in the family’s dining room, acting with her brother, two sisters and cousins in front of relatives and neighbours.
Lim’s parents had plans for her to study at Cambridge University, with the aim of a career in law or accountancy, but she shocked them by dropping the bombshell that she was leaving home at the age of 16 to train at the London School of Dramatic Art. She lived with her brother and changed her name from Phaik Seng to Pik-Sen Lim: “My English friends were calling me ‘fake’ and I told myself, ‘This just won’t do.’”
Her professional stage debut came in Euripides’s Greek tragedy The Bacchae (Mermaid theatre, 1964) and she starred in the East German TV drama The Girl from the Jungle (1964), about Malaya’s struggle for independence. In 1968, after her run in Emergency – Ward 10 ended, she married one of its scriptwriters, Don Houghton, who later created the Scottish soap Take the High Road.
Houghton wrote the 1971 Doctor Who serial Mind of Evil, in which Lim played Captain Chin Lee, a member of the Chinese delegation at a world peace conference who, coming under the power of the Time Lord’s arch-enemy, the Master, heightens tensions with the US. Lim also translated some lines into the Chinese language of Hokkien for a conversation between a delegate and Jon Pertwee, as the Doctor.
While amassing dozens of one-off character parts on television, Lim appeared in half a dozen films. Her roles included an assistant to the Thought Factory boss acted by Bette Davis in Madame Sin (1972); the wife of an Asian diplomat (played by Burt Kwouk) in Plenty (1985), starring Meryl Streep; and a performance alongside Rowan Atkinson in Johnny English Reborn (2011) that led one critic to note that the “best of the physical shtick here is the recurring appearance of an Asian granny called ‘the killer cleaner’ (Pik-Sen Lim), whose vacuum sweeper comes with an array of lethal attachments, including a chainsaw”.
Her later TV parts included Aladdin’s mother in the mini-series Arabian Nights (2000) and the regular roles of Chien, another student of English as a second language, in This Way Up (2019-21) and Queen Marina in the boarding school fantasy Vampire Academy (2022). She also voiced Grandma in the animated children’s series Luo Bao Bei (2018).
Lim and her husband were divorced shortly before his death in 1991. She is survived by their daughter, the actor Sara Houghton, a granddaughter, Phoebe, and her sister Quee Lin Lim.
• Pik-Sen Lim (Lim Phaik Seng), actor, born 15 September 1943; died 9 June 2025
