Biography

Paula Elsa Jacobs (1932 – 26 June 2021) was a British actress whose television and film career spanned four decades. Born in Liverpool in 1932 into a Jewish family, her father was J. P. Jacobs, whose company supplied all the elastic to Marks & Spencer. Jacobs made her first television appearance in Z-Cars in 1962, going on to play roles in Softly, Softly: Task Force (1972–1975), Shoestring (1979), Hammer House of Horror (1980), Mapp & Lucia (1985), Mrs Biggs in Porterhouse Blue (1987), The New Statesman (1989), Bergerac (1990), Maud Wilberforce in Jeeves and Wooster (1990), Brookside (1992), French and Saunders (1993), Coronation Street (1994), Casualty (1989–1995), Drop the Dead Donkey (1994–1998), Dalziel and Pascoe (2000), Midsomer Murders (2002), Agatha Christie's Poirot (2004) and Doctors (2008).