Jill Freud

Actor and political wife, mother of five and inspiration for CS Lewis's Lucy Pevensie was 'a force of nature'

- Patrick Kidd

At the wedding in 1950 of June Flewett and Clement Freud, grandson of the psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud, it was the bride who had top billing. “West End star marries cook,” ran one headline.

Under the stage name Jill Raymond, she had made a successful start to her career after studying at Rada, where her fees were paid by the author CS Lewis, with whom she had stayed as an evacuee during the war.

She had appeared on stage with Michael Redgrave and on screen with Jean Simmons and was starring with Ralph Richardson in RC Sherriff's Home at Seven when she met the catering manager of the Arts Theatre Club in Soho. It was a whirlwind romance: they met in April, Freud announced their engagement in June (before he had even asked her to marry him) and the wedding was in September

Jill Freud’s acting career stalled. She narrated a children’s television series called Torchy the Battery Boy from 1959 to 1961 but as she raised a family — Nicola, Ashley, Dominic, Emma and Matthew — and her husband's career in writing, broadcasting and dog-food commercials took off, her name appeared in lights less often.

By the time Freud was elected MP for the Isle of Ely in 1973, the billing had reversed. “MP’s wife in play” was the headline when she appeared in The Dame of Sark in Oxford.