On 1 January 1968, viewers of the TV soap opera Coronation Street experienced a mild culture shock as a clump of hippies decked out in floral shirts, Afghan coats and John Lennon spectacles temporarily took over the house at No 11, former home to Elsie Tanner. Among the somnambulant invaders was Monica Sutton, who plucked the black wig dreamily from her head as she entered, and handed it to the bemused tenant. Offered a snack, she replied: “I’ll have a tomato, darlin’.” She then contemplated the food as if hypnotised by it. “Blows my mind,” she sighed.

The hippies scarpered four episodes later, but television audiences over the next half a century became accustomed to the wan, haunted face of Angela Pleasence, who played Monica with such economical wit.

Pleasence, who has died aged 84, made guest appearances on everything from Dixon of Dock Green and The Bill (twice) to Midsomer Murders and Casualty (also twice). She appeared in numerous literary adaptations – she was an especially fine Lady Bertram in the BBC’s six-part Mansfield Park in 1983 – and played Elizabeth I in a 2007 episode of Doctor Who.

Profiling her in 1970, the Guardian described her as “beautifully gaunt, heroically dolorous … a fragile, bird-boned waif … pallid-complexioned, wistful and almost vacant of expression”.

She bore a striking facial resemblance to her famous father, Donald, star of Harold Pinter’s The Caretaker and the Halloween horror franchise. Their intent eyes sat in identically sunken sockets and they shared an ability to invest wheedling, feeble or beseeching characters with unexpected notes of comedy, pity or menace.

They looked so much alike, said the Daily Record, that “the only way they can work together is to play father and daughter”. This they did on two occasions. In the portmanteau horror film From Beyond the Grave (1974), Pleasence père et fille ensnare a frustrated middle manager (Ian Bannen) and free him from a loveless marriage at a terrible cost. In a 1982 BBC adaptation of Trollope’s The Barchester Chronicles, Donald shed his sinister associations to play the beatific Rev Septimus Harding, while Angela was his adoring daughter Mrs Grantly.

“I wasn’t really aware what my father was until I was 15 or 16,” she said. “I just thought he was great, that’s all. It wouldn’t have mattered if he’d been a dustman – he’d have been a great dustman. I think I was very lucky it turned out he was a great actor.”

She was born in Chapeltown, Yorkshire. Her mother, Miriam Raymond, also an actor, was the first of her father’s four wives. Four years elapsed between Angela leaving her school in Hoddesdon, Hertfordshire, and deciding to become an actor. In between, she enrolled at a technical college to begin a pre-nursing course, which she left after a year, then worked in Paris as an au pair. Returning home, she auditioned successfully at Rada by performing a Victorian street ballad.

Her work there was characterised by timidity. “It wasn’t until my very last term that I actually started speaking,” she said, “and then it was to play old ladies, so that I could bend over and mumble.”

After graduating, she joined Birmingham Repertory theatre and made her professional debut in 1964 as Titania in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. She then married the actor Michael Cadman, became a mother and experienced an extended bout of unemployment.

“Being Donald Pleasence’s daughter didn’t help me escape being turned down in thousands of auditions,” she said. “No one wanted me.”

Gradually, she amassed stage and television work, and made her film debut, billed as “Scruffy girl”, in Here We Go Round the Mulberry Bush (1968), about a teenager trying to lose his virginity in Stevenage.

Other screen roles included Peter Terson’s The Last Train Through the Harecastle Tunnel, broadcast in 1969 in the BBC’s Wednesday Play slot and directed by Alan Clarke. Her character, a judge’s daughter who frolics with the gardener, is one of the eccentrics encountered by a train-spotter over the course of a bank holiday weekend.

In theatre, she was already a force to be reckoned with. Reviewing her performance as a patient in a psychiatric institution in The Ha Ha, directed by Richard Eyre at the Edinburgh Lyceum theatre in 1967, Allen Wright in the Scotsman wrote: “Surely no other actress could play this part so perfectly – a still, small, huddled figure with deep-set eyes and a frown conveying infinite preoccupation.” The following year, Wright commended her “touching and delicate” work as Irena in Eyre’s revival of Chekhov’s Three Sisters.

At the start of 1970, she gave a magnetic, febrile performance as 17-year-old Catherine Howard in the BBC series The Six Wives of Henry VIII. Catherine’s uncle, the 3rd Duke of Norfolk (Patrick Troughton), coaches her to catch the eye of the King (Keith Michell) by telling her: “This is your moment!” It was undoubtedly Pleasence’s own annus mirabilis – later on in the year the New York Times was impressed by her “fiercely individual” Miranda in Jonathan Miller’s production of The Tempest at the Mermaid theatre in London. The Telegraph called her “a little Charlotte Brontë of a Miranda, a frail country girl with a shut-in imaginative life of her own”.

Also at the Mermaid that year, she took the title role in Shaw’s Saint Joan. Her casting was widely agreed to be unconventional: the Eastern Daily Press likened her to “a fuming sparrow”. But even as JC Trewin in the Illustrated London News regretted that “Shaw’s text must fend for itself in the rush of her delivery,” he also noted that her “sharply touching” performance “suggests that Angela Pleasence, an actress entirely without the rubber stamp of routine, will have much to give”.

During the curtain call, observed Jack Tinker in The Daily Sketch, she looked “like a 12-year-old dragged out before the grown-ups to bob a curtsey for a party piece she had been forced to recite. She giggled nervously into the thunder – and then she fled.” Pleasence explained that she had “never been left alone on a stage before. I was just so embarrassed by it all.”

She went on to star in the film Hitler: The Last Ten Days (1973), with Alec Guinness in the title role, the horror movie Symptoms AKA The Blood Virgin (1974) and as Fantine on TV in Les Misérables (1978).

In 1980, Pinter directed her at Hampstead theatre in his play The Hothouse, and again in the 1982 television version. She donned a blond wig to play the Ghost of Christmas Past in A Christmas Carol (1984), made for TV but released in UK cinemas. George C Scott was Scrooge while the director was Clive Donner, who had given Pleasence her film debut in Here We Go Round the Mulberry Bush.

Later films included Martin Scorsese’s 19th-century epic Gangs of New York (2002), in which Pleasence is shot in the chest after pulling a knife on the cutpurse played by Cameron Diaz.

She turned up in an episode of Dr Terrible’s House of Horrible (2001), Steve Coogan’s BBC2 comedy series spoofing exactly the kind of British horror films in which she and her father had starred, and as a witch in the medieval stoner comedy Your Highness (2011).

Her final appearances came in two acclaimed TV crime dramas. In Whitechapel (2013), she was Louise Iver, who is linked to a string of gruesome and archaic crimes. In 2016, she starred as Winnie, the elderly next-door neighbour of Sgt Catherine Cawood (Sarah Lancashire), in the second series of Happy Valley. An emigrant from the former Yugoslavia, Winnie takes in a trafficked Croatian woman and is warned by Catherine to keep the door locked lest the woman’s former captors track her down. “Oh, I thought I might leave it wide open and put a sign out: ‘Traffickers, this way.’ And an arrow.” The sarcasm is all but disguised by Pleasence’s sweetly quivering voice.

She is survived by a son, Pascoe, from her marriage to Cadman, which ended in divorce in 1970.