She is the eldest child of Frank Francis, a clerical officer with the Royal Agricultural Society of England,[2] and Marjorie (née Watling), an employment agent, who were married[3] in 1944.
Writer John Sullivan met Francis and later created her best-known part, Penny Warrender, in the 1980s BBC sitcom Just Good Friends.
During the late 1980s and early 1990s, she appeared in the Lloyds Bank television commercials alongside Nigel Havers and Leo McKern.
In 2006, she guest starred in ITV prison drama Bad Girls as interior designer Catherine Earlham, who was sent to Larkhall on remand for embezzlement.
Francis married the actor-writer Martin Thurley in Newton Abbot on 1 August 1977; he writes using the pseudonym Thomas Ellice.