Mollie Sugden

The actor Mollie Sugden, who has died aged 86, was part of a long and honourable – though now almost extinct – line of British battleaxes. The characters played by this portly and mock-severe actress were almost always plebianised versions of Oscar Wilde's grand dame Lady Bracknell, with dodgily "refined" accent and implausibly overdone patrician gesticulations. She is most likely to be remembered for the character of Mrs Slocombe from the television comedy series Are You Being Served? and its successor Grace and Favour, the saga of a department store kept by the feudal Grace family, to whom all loyal employees are expected to bow and scrape even lower than they are expected to bow and scrape to the customers.

Arch, unconvincingly haughty, protected by a cocoon of unworldliness, and apt to launch into ambiguous remarks about the current plight of her pussy, the overseer of the lingerie department Mrs Slocombe was part of a very funny series which dominated 1970s television comedy after a rocky start, in which many BBC executives doubted the wisdom of introducing such a bawdy mock-genteel band of seaside-postcard types to the nation's screens.

Jeremy Lloyd and David Croft, who wrote the series, had to fight hard to retain the character of the camp shop assistant Mr Humphries, always keen to measure clients' inside legs and played by John Inman. Once they threatened to walk away from the series unless he were retained. "Get rid of the poof!" one BBC executive told Croft, to receive the reply, "If the poof goes, I go." It is distinctly possible that the Inman character was the lightning conductor that saved Mrs Slocombe from humourless attack on the grounds that she made a certain sort of woman look ridiculous. As it was, the nation took both Mr Humphries and Mrs Slocombe to its heart, and the BBC successfully exported the series to many other countries.

Mollie Sugden, as a result, became an unlikely cult figure in the US when, in the 1990s, the 60 episodes of the series were run and re-run there. In Boston, Philadelphia and San Francisco, Are You Being Served? was on screen five nights a week, and Mollie Sugden, according to American newspapers, was a better-known figure than the then British prime minister John Major. When Sugden and Inman went to Tennessee to popularise the series there, the queues of admirers and autograph hunters stretched twice around the studio building.

For Sugden, Are You Being Served? was part of a hat-trick. Her other memorable television roles were Nellie Harvey, the rival landlord to Annie Walker in Coronation Street, and Mrs Hutchinson, the irritably snobbish mother of Sandra in The Liver Birds who is a sore embarrassment to both Sandra and her flat-mate in Liverpool. Her husband in the latter series was played by her real husband, the actor William Moore, a former professor of drama at the Old Vic School of Drama, Bristol. They met at Swansea rep, one of the many repertory companies she joined in the first eight years of her professional life, where they earned £12 a week. They announced their engagement when she was appearing in Saturday Night at the Crown at the Garrick Theatre, London. They had twin sons.

The Coronation Street and Liverpool roles were more in line with her own geographical background. After she was the subject of a This Is Your Life television programme, she mildly complained that her story had been portrayed as one of rags to riches, whereas in fact she had few rags in her past and little riches in her present.

But her background was certainly rough-hewn. She was born Mary Isobel Sugden in Keighley in West Yorkshire. She discovered her flair for self-projection early. At four she heard a woman getting applause for reciting a funny poem at a village concert, and the following year stood on a chair and did a recitation; the audience collapsed with laughter and she decided that comedy was her forte. She was educated at Keighley girls' grammar school, and when she went to Holland in a party of 800 British schoolgirls, she was chosen to represent them in a concert in Amsterdam.

At 23 and after two years of study and three awards, she graduated from the Guildhall School of Music and Drama, maintaining that the school had smoothed out her northern accent and made her talk like a duchess. She went straight to a repertory company in Accrington in Lancashire, where she performed a twice-nightly play with Eric Sykes. Three months later, for £3 a week, she moved to Oldham rep. There she learned one of the maxims she followed: that situation comedy has to be taken seriously if you are to please the audience rather than yourself.

It was a rule she brought to all her television roles, in shows which included Hugh and I, Please Sir!, Doctor in the House, For the Love of Ada, That's My Boy, My Husband and I, and the programme written especially for her by Jeremy Lloyd and David Croft, Come Back Mrs Noah, a surreal series in which a housewife in 2050 accidentally launches herself into space without a pilot and can't get back, which required her to be not much like Mrs Slocombe and was not nearly as big a success.

She knew that, despite the enormous following of the battleaxes she created, she was an unassuming supporting player rather than an "important" star. When her husband was once asked what item she would not be able to do without on a desert island, he said the complete works of Shakespeare. She herself said: "My knitting bag, stuffed with lots of wool – I'd never get bored."

Her husband died in 2000; her sons survive her.

Mary Isobel Sugden, actress, born 21 July 1922; died 1 July 2009