Patricia Greene, who has died aged 95, was the world’s longest-serving soap opera actor, and featured in The Archers on BBC radio for 68 years. She joined as Jill Paterson, a demonstrator of kitchen appliances, in 1957, and evolved into the serial’s stern, sometimes interfering, matriarch after marrying Phil Archer (played by Norman Painting).
At her audition for the role, Greene was faced with a quandary. “The script was a rather domineering woman who was demonstrating a machine called the Household Drudge at a garden fete, but it was put to me as ‘a sexy blonde in a tea tent’,” she recalled. She decided to deliver her lines in the deep, sultry tones of the actor Fenella Fielding.
