Boht also appeared in I Woke Up One Morning and Brighton Belles, as well as the drama Boys From the Blackstuff.
The announcement comes a month after her husband, composer Carl Davis, died.
According to her family, “it is with overwhelming sadness that we must announce that Jean Boht passed away yesterday, Tuesday September 12.”
According to the statement, “Jean had been battling vascular dementia and Alzheimer’s disease with the indefatigable spirit for which she was both beloved and renowned.”
Boht, who was born in Bebington on the Wirral, began her stage career in the early 1960s at the Liverpool Playhouse before touring the UK.
On television, she played Mrs. Leivers in an adaptation of DH Lawrence’s novel Sons and Lovers in 1981, and a benefits office manager in Alan Bleasdale’s seminal Boys From the Blackstuff.
A role in Carla Lane’s sitcom I Woke Up One Morning, about a group of recovering alcoholics, led to her casting in Bread.
She quickly became known as the intimidating Nellie Boswell, who was continually trying to keep her huge Liverpool family in check.
The show was a huge success, with 21 million viewers tuning in to see a wedding episode in 1988, making it the second most popular show that year, after only EastEnders.
“I never watched it at the time because it’s too painful for actors to see themselves on screen,” she told the Liverpool Echo in 2012.
“But now that I’ve caught it, I’m just astounded at how good it was and how funny it was,” she continued.
Boht was also in Terence Davies’ 1988 film Distant Voices, Still Lives.
In 1993, she co-starred with Sheila Hancock, Wendy Craig, and Sheila Gish in Brighton Belles, a British adaptation of the successful US sitcom The Golden Girls.
Boht portrayed Josephine, the new version of the American original’s Sophia, played by Estelle Getty. However, the UK remake was a flop.
Later, she stated that portraying five separate characters in the BBC’s medical soap opera Doctors was a show record, and she continued to work on stage, including in Embers in London’s West End in 2006.
According to her family, she was a resident of Denville Hall in London, a care home for performers and other members of the entertainment business.
