As the dowdy, unsmiling Pauline Fowler in EastEnders, Wendy Richard suffered for England. On the plump side and with a wardrobe rarely containing anything more glamorous than baggy cardigans and a blue overall, Pauline stoically and heroically endured everything the scriptwriters could throw at her.

She had an unfaithful husband who was wrongly imprisoned and left her a widow, a son with HIV and a teenage daughter made pregnant by the show’s resident villain, Dirty Den. She lost her mother, and her twin brother was killed in a car crash. Giving birth again at the age of 41 was a rare moment of happiness for the character.

Richard was in the first episode of EastEnders, transmitted in February 1985, and when she bowed out nearly 22 years later only Adam Woodyatt, who played Pauline’s nephew, Ian Beale, remained of the original cast. Pauline, who ran a café and worked in a launderette as an escape from her family troubles, was a survivor. So, too, was Richard, who came through cancer and three broken marriages and the intense media scrutiny which befalls stars of soap opera.

Pauline was a far cry from the role which first brought Richard to attention after making her television debut as a 16-year-old and spending a decade in the anonymity of bit parts. The breakthrough was being cast as the blonde, buxom and leggy Miss Brahms, the raucous, scatter-brained assistant to Molly Sugden’s imperious Mrs Slocombe in the department store comedy Are You Being Served?

Times Archive, 1985: Eastenders: BBC's new soap opera

The only thing that keeps them going is gossip: Albert Square is awash with it

• Review, 1973: Are You Being Served?

Launched on the BBC in 1973, its broad and vulgar humour owed much to the double entendre of the seaside postcard. The show ran for 13 years and drew audiences at its peak of 22 million. Long after it had finished Richard was still getting 200 fan letters a week for Miss Brahms and the show was an unlikely hit in the United States where Richard found herself recognised in shops and in the street.

She was born Wendy Emerton in Middlesbrough in 1943 but moved to London where her parents, Henry and Beatrice, ran a series of pubs. At the age of 11 she found her father dead in front of a gas fire. Acute depression after he had been told he had a serious illness had driven him to suicide. Richard was sent by her mother to board at the Royal Masonic School in Hertfordshire. She left, aged 15, determined to become an actress.

But her first job was a junior in the fashion department of Fortnum & Mason. It was only a brief stay and her mother, now running a small hotel near King’s Cross station in London, got her to the Italia Conti stage school, where she adopted a surname easier to remember, and she was soon in work. Her mother, who never recovered from her husband’s death, became an alcoholic and died of liver cancer just before Are You Being Served? brought her daughter fame.

Richard made her television debut while still at drama school on a show starring Sammy Davis Jr and she was one half of a comedy pop record, Come Outside, by Mike Sarne. Although it sold more than half a million copies and went to No 1 in the charts, Richard received a flat fee of £15. In 1965 she was cast in the Beatles film Help! but her footage ended up on the cutting-room floor. She was luckier with The Newcomers, a BBC soap produced by Julia Smith who later helped to create EastEnders, and she had an effective cameo in the film Gumshoe (1971), trading verbal blows with Albert Finney’s aspiring private eye.

Her forte, at this time, was comedy. She had small roles in popular television sitcoms including The Likely Lads, Please Sir! and On the Buses and a bigger one in Dad’s Army, as the bubble-haired girlfriend of Private Walker. She joined the Carry on team for Carry on Matron (1972) and Carry On Girls (1973) and supported Frankie Howerd on a concert tour of military bases in Northern Ireland.

But she was still largely unknown until Are You Being Served? which was co-written, like Dad’s Army, by David Croft. She was back as Miss Brahms in a 1992 sequel called Grace and Favour, in which she and other former luminaries of the Grace Brothers store take over a hotel. But it failed to capture the elan of the original and had a short and forgettable run.

Richard’s own life was often as hard as that of her famous soap character. Like Pauline Fowler she often needed grit and self-reliance to carry her through. A heavy smoker until 1983, she gave up with the help of an acupuncturist. Breast cancer was diagnosed in 1996 and she had a lump removed. Six years later it was revealed that she was again suffering from cancer and had had a tumour removed from her neck.

After appearing in 1,400 episodes, she left EastEnders in 2006. The scriptwriters decided to make Pauline’s death in the Albert Square snow an audience-grabbing highlight of that year’s Christmas Day double-bill. Although Pauline had become a less prominent figure in later years, she was one of the strongest and longest-serving British soap characters, epitomising working-class resilience in the face of relentless adversity.

Richard said later that one of the reasons for leaving the show was her unhappiness with a storyline in which Pauline remarried, which she felt was out of character. “I couldn’t believe in what they wanted me to do and unless I can find some truth in what I am doing I cannot play it,” she said. The marriage was transmitted in February 2006, as EastEnders celebrated its 21st anniversary.

Richard denied there was any tension between herself and Ray Brooks, who played her new husband, but said she found their scenes harder to perform than those with Bill Treacher as her first screen husband, with whom she felt a special chemistry. Overall she thought that EastEnders was never better than in its early years and resented increasing attempts by the scriptwriters to portray Pauline as a battle-axe rather than someone fighting for her family.

She admitted that the strain of having to get up at 5am and spend 12-hour days on the set was something she would not miss, though she insisted that she was not retiring.

Richard’s cancer had gone into remission and by 2005 she was given the all-clear. But three years later it returned in a more aggressive form and in October 2008 she announced that the disease was terminal. In that month she married her long-time partner, John Burns, a painter and decorator 20 years her junior. The honeymoon was put on hold while she underwent chemotherapy. She was married three times previously. Her first husband was Len Black, a music publisher more than 20 years her senior. She married Will Thorpe, an advertising art director, in 1980 after a stormy six years together. Her third husband was Paul Glorney, a carpet fitter. The marriage ended in 1994 after four years. She had no children.

Richard was a devoted, unostentatious worker for charities, notably the Variety Club Gold Heart Campaign for sick, disabled and disadvantaged children and Dogs for the Disabled. She was appointed MBE in 2000.

Wendy Richard, MBE, actress, was born on July 20, 1943. She died of cancer on February 26, 2009, aged 65