Actress and star of The Royle Family

Born: December 11, 1921;

Died: December 24, 2016

LIZ Smith, who has died aged 95, acted for much of her life, but she did not turn professional until she was in her forties and had raised a family as a single mother. And she was in her mid-seventies before she became a household name playing the demanding grandmother in The Royle Family, which ran from 1998 until 2006.

Smith had been appearing on television and in films since the early 1970s, often playing slightly dotty old women, though sometimes a twinkle in her eye suggested she was not quite as detached from reality as it might at first have seemed.

She looked like your average granny. As an actress, she had a wonderful deadpan expression and delivery. She was a great character off screen as well, with a dry sense of humour.

I first came across her in 1989 when she appeared in an offbeat British domestic comedy called We Think the World of You. She was part of an ensemble cast that included Alan Bates, Gary Oldman, Max Wall and a chubby infant, described by one critic as the ugliest baby ever to appear in a film.

Defending her young co-star, Smith called him a “character baby”. She said his performance was shaped largely by the presence or absence of food.

Before The Royle Family, Smith was better known within the profession than she was to the general public, although she won a Bafta award as best supporting actress for the comedy film A Private Function (1984), in which she played Maggie Smith’s mother. They were not related in real life.

In fact Liz was only 13 years older than Maggie, though she started playing old women in children’s theatre productions when she was about ten.

She was born Betty Gleadle in Scunthorpe in Lincolnshire in 1921. Betty was her registered name, rather than a diminutive, even though she later switched to another diminutive of Elizabeth. Her mother died when she was an infant and her father wanted nothing more to do with her.

“My father was a bit of a sod really,” she said. “He just went off with loads of women and then married one who said he had to cut off completely from his prior life and that meant me.”

Brought up by a widowed grandmother, Smith began acting as a child and continued appearing in plays and shows while serving in the Women’s Royal Naval Service during the Second World War.

She met her future husband Jack Thomas while they were both stationed in India. They married and had two children, but the marriage ended in divorce. Smith had to put her acting ambitions on hold while bringing up the children by herself, earning money with various jobs, including postwoman and working in a plastic bag factory.

She subsequently worked as an entertainer at Butlins holiday camps and in repertory theatre. But it was tough making a name for herself in her forties and she had to take other casual jobs too.

“I was standing in Hamleys one Christmas, flogging toys,” she recalled. “And I got a message from this young director named Mike Leigh. I was nearly 50 at the time, but he wanted a middle-aged woman to do improvisations. I went to an audition and I got the job of the mother in this improvised film, Bleak Moments, his first film, and it changed my life.”

Smith was well suited to the fashionably downbeat, realist strain of British television plays and appeared in several dramas in the BBC’s prestigious Play for Today slot, including Leigh’s Hard Labour. It provided her with a starring role as a middle-aged housewife, condemned to a life of drudgery. Smith looked the part, far removed from the expensive cosmetic beauty of Hollywood.

David Copperfield (1974), in which she was Mrs Heep, was the first of several Dickens adaptations in which she appeared. And she did get to rub shoulders with Hollywood royalty when she played the self-righteous Mrs Fairley in The French Lieutenant’s Woman (1981), with Meryl Streep

Other prestigious television and film roles followed and she had recurring roles in 2Point4 Children (1991-99) and The Vicar of Dibley (1994-96). But it was Nana in The Royle Family that belatedly elevated her from supporting actor to a star.

It was comedy that owed more to the kitchen sink dramas of the recent past than to the traditional sitcom. The humour came naturally from the eponymous grown-up family as they lazed about on the sofa, doing nothing much, except chatting. Sometimes it seemed they struggled to find the energy to do even that. There would be long pauses while characters tried to make sense of what had just been said.

Smith felt much of the show’s success was down to the scripts by Caroline Aherne, who also played her granddaughter and who died earlier this year. The Queen of Sheba, the 2006 episode in which Nana died, was repeated just before Christmas.

On the back of The Royle Family, Smith became the “grandmother of choice” for casting directors and featured in that role in Tim Burton’s 2005 adaptation of Charlie and Chocolate Factory, with Johnny Depp. She also had a recurring role in Lark Rise to Candleford (2008), by which time she was in the second half of her eighties.

She was in declining health and was in a wheelchair when she was invested as an MBE in 2009 by Prince Charles, who assured her that his own family was nothing like the Royle family of which she was a part.

BRIAN PENDREIGH