In the 1970s and 1980s, Wendy Craig emerged as one of the most familiar faces of British domestic situation comedy, starring in a string of series in which she typically played a self-searching housewife and mother struggling to cope with the various demands made by her family, her home, and life in general.

Craig began a career on the stage as a very young child and later entered films before establishing herself as a television performer. Not in Front of the Children was the first of the sitcoms in which she was cast in the role of harassed mother, a role she was later to make peculiarly her own. Resilient and yet sensitive (or, according to critics of the program and its successors, simpering and middle class), her character, Jennifer Corner, held the family together through crises both trivial and serious. The character appealed to thousands of real women whose days were similarly filled. Newly widowed Sally Harrison in And Mother Makes Three (later retitled And Mother Makes Five after Sally remarried) and Ria Parkinson in Carla Lane’s Butterflies were essentially extensions of the same character; only the members of the families and the details of the kitchen decor changed.

Butterflies, with Carla Lane’s fluent scripts, was perhaps the most assured of the sitcoms in which Craig was invited to explore the state of mind of a flustered contemporary housewife facing a midlife crisis. Supported by the lugubrious but always watchable Geoffrey Palmer as her husband and the up-and-coming Nicholas Lyndhurst as one of her two sons (the other was played by Andrew Hall), Craig played the part at a high pitch—sometimes arguably overhysterically—as she debated ways to break out of the confinements of the life imposed upon her by her family (chiefly through seemingly endless contemplation of an affair with the smooth and wealthy businessman Leonard Dunn, played by Bruce Montague). The comedy was often obvious (Ria’s failure to cook anything without destroying it risked becoming tiresome), the pathos was sometimes painful, and the central character’s self-absorption and inability to help herself was irritating to many more liberated viewers, but the skillful characterizations and the pace at which events were played, together with the quality of the support, kept the series fresh and intriguing and ensured a large and faithful audience.

Nanny, about the experiences of a children’s nanny in the 1930s, represented something of a variation upon the matriarchal roles with which Craig had become associated. The story of nanny Barbara Gray, caring for the children of the rich and well connected, was in fact Craig’s own idea, submitted and accepted under a pen name after she got the idea while flicking through advertisements for children’s nurses in The Lady magazine. The program eschewed comedy for a straighter dramatic approach. Comparisons between Craig’s enlightened nanny Gray adding a helping hand to obviously dysfunctional upper-crust families and cinema’s Mary Poppins were inevitable but did not detract from the success of the series, and an increase in the numbers of girls planning careers as nannies was duly reported as a result.

Since the late 1980s, perhaps reflecting changes in society in general, Craig’s matriarch has largely disappeared from the screen. Laura and Disorder, which Craig and her real-life son had a hand in writing, depicted her as an accident-prone divorcée newly returned from the United States, but this program proved weak and was only short-lived. Even more misjudged was the attempt to make a British version of the highly acclaimed U.S. comedy series The Golden Girls, under the title Brighton Belles, with Craig cast as Annie, the equivalent of Rose in the original. The scripts failed entirely to match the wit and vivacity of the U.S. original, and the project was quickly abandoned. Craig has remained busy as a stage actress and in 2001 was cast as Aunt Juley in a major remake of the classic television serial The Forsyte Saga.