Ruth Madoc was born Margaret Ruth Llewellyn Baker on 16 April 1943 in Norwich, Norfolk, England. Her parents ran care institutions and travelled around Britain for work throughout much of her childhood, so young Ruth was brought up chiefly by her Welsh grandmother, Etta Williams, at Llansamlet near Swansea. This settles a question long debated in this record's reader comments: Ruth's birth city was Norwich, but Llansamlet, Swansea, is where she was raised and where her lifelong Welsh identity took root.
She trained at RADA in London between 1959 and 1961 before spending several years as a singer-dancer in touring musical revues. Her stage career included the title role of Aldonza in Man of La Mancha in the West End, and on screen she played Fruma Sarah in the 1971 film of Fiddler on the Roof and Mrs Dai Bread Two in the 1972 film of Under Milk Wood.
Madoc became a household name playing Gladys Pugh in the BBC sitcom Hi-de-Hi! (1980-1988), earning a BAFTA nomination for Best Light Entertainment Performance for her portrayal of the holiday camp entertainments officer forever pining for Jeffrey Fairbrother. She went on to appear in Little Britain, Benidorm, Casualty and Doctors, among many other credits, and received an honorary fellowship from Swansea University in 2006. In 2010, researching her family tree for BBC Wales' Coming Home, she discovered she was a distant cousin of Prime Minister David Lloyd George, whom she had earlier portrayed alongside on screen in The Life and Times of David Lloyd George (1981).
Ruth married fellow actor Philip Madoc in 1961; the couple had a son and a daughter before divorcing in 1981. She later married John Jackson in 1982, and the couple made their home in Glynneath, Wales, from 2002 until his death in 2021. Ruth Madoc died on 9 December 2022 in Torquay, Devon, aged 79.