Gretchen Franklin, who has died aged 94, was an actor with an 80-year career who missed by a hairsbreadth the chance of appearing in one famous television series, but later achieved enhanced popular fame in another at the age of 73.
The part she did not play was Alf Garnett's wife in Till Death Us Do Part. She took the role in the 1965 Comedy Playhouse pilot programme, when the foul-mouthed and bigoted hero was called Alf Ramsey. But it was Dandy Nichols who went on to play Alf Garnett's wife in the long-running comedy series which gave an entirely new edge to soap opera.
However, in 1985, Franklin joined the cast of EastEnders, playing Ethel Skinner, the friend of the equally quietly scatty Dot Cotton, played by June Brown. One of her most popular pieces of comic business consisted of her droning monologues with her pug dog, "my little Willy", so that more imaginative viewers almost expected the dog to reply out of sheer impatient irritation.
Though she left the series, and her favourite and much frequented watering hole, Albert Square's Queen Vic pub, in 1999, after doing the can-can, that was not the end of the monologues. In 2000, Dot Cotton helped Franklin's character to take her own life. Though 15 million viewers watched the funeral, Franklin did not, claiming that she did not miss the show, only the money.
Her cousin was Clive Dunn, the "They don't like it up 'em!" veteran of Dad's Army, and she came from a line of other stage professionals. Her grandfather had been a music-hall entertainer, and her father had a song and dance act.
While living in the family home in south-west London (she was born in Covent Garden), she had her stage debut as a pantomime chorus girl in Bournemouth, earning £2 a week. She thought she was only a plump little girl, but audiences were more appreciative.
From 1929, she went to lessons at the Theatre Girls Club in Soho, became a noted tap dancer and founded a quartet called Four Brilliant Blondes. She joined the Gracie Fields Show on tour and danced with another group, the Three Girlies. After touring with comedians Syd and Max Harrison, she married the revue writer Caswell Garth, and was given a part in the highly successful revue Sweet And Low during the war. It was the first of many successful revues at the Ambassadors Theatre, in which she starred with Hermione Gingold. The two became friends, appearing together again in Slings And Arrows at the Comedy Theatre in 1948.
After acting in some straight plays, Franklin gradually switched to straight theatre, and then to films, starting with Before I Wake (1954), and television. Though she did not play lead parts, she became a familiar face in British movies, appearing in Cloak Without Dagger and High Terrace (both 1956), Flame In the Streets (1961), Help! and Die, Monster, Die! (both 1965), Twisted Nerve (1968), Subterfuge (1969) and The Night Visitor (1971).
On television she worked widely, sometimes as a guest player in popular series such as Dixon Of Dock Green, in which she featured between 1961 and 1967. Though the series in which she was conspicuously involved, Castle Haven (1969), was not a great success, she also appeared in Z Cars between 1964 and 1973, Softly Softly (1973), The Sweeney, Some Mothers Do Have 'Em, and Rising Damp (all 1978) and Terry and June (1981).
She did little theatre work after joining EastEnders, but in the 1970s and 1980s she was in Grease at the Astoria Theatre, in which she played the head teacher, and Hedda Gabler at the Cambridge Theatre, in which she played the maid. Her final stage appearance was in Hay Fever at Chichester in 1988.
"Irrepressible" was the word used most commonly by those who appeared with her in EastEnders. It was a quality that featured in her work and her life, which embraced donating all the money she made from repeats of her television programmes to animal charities. "At my age one isn't buying new fur coats or diamonds," she explained.
Her husband predeceased her.
· Gretchen Franklin, actor, born July 7 1911; died July 11 2005
