For the record, she is not much for swearing.

“Well, yes, I do swear,” Jean Hamilton said, “but I try to limit it. I don’t swear in public, only in private, and I have to be provoked by something awful happening, like if I dropped a casserole I had just made.”

Jean is 89. She is 4-foot-11. She was born in Victoria, grew up in Vancouver and now lives in North Vancouver. If there were a template for Little Old Lady, it would be Jean, which explains her late-in-life celebrity. Jean is the little old lady in the Frank’s RedHot Sauce ads who, profanely going against character, immortalizes the line:

“I put that s--- on everything.”

In the ads, the “s---” is bleeped out.

“But I had to say it during the shoot,” Jean said. “They insisted I had to say the word.”

It catapulted her into that weird pantheon of TV commercial stars, along with the “Where’s the beef?” woman (another little old lady) and the Taco Bell chihuahua. The popular ads — four of which have run so far — also catapulted Frank’s RedHot Sauce into the hottest seller in North America.

Hers was a long and unlikely road to stardom. Growing up through the Depression, she couldn’t afford university and worked as a paint clerk for Eaton’s, a skip-tracer, a tax assessor for Canada Revenue and a social worker for the City of Vancouver. Along the way, there were two marriages, both of which ended in divorce — the first to a millionaire land developer, the second to a right-of-way agent with a major U.S. oil company. After marrying the second time, she quit her job with the city, and for six years, lived in the U.S.

“We moved around a lot because of his work. We lived in every state west of the Mississippi.”

Her two marriages produced a son, who lives in Nanaimo, a daughter, who lives in Langley, three grandchildren, one great-grandchild, and an abiding sense of self-reliance. After her second marriage, she took back her maiden name. She wanted nothing, she said, from her husbands.

“I never felt I needed liberating. I always felt I could achieve.”

After her second marriage broke up, she came back to Canada a few months after her 65th birthday. The timing meant she didn’t get a full pension.

“So I had to find something to do, because there wasn’t enough money coming in. So I started a house-sitting business, and I did that for a few years. But I was never at home and I was living out of a suitcase, so I retired.”

She supplemented what little pension money that was coming in by selling her knitting, sewing and needlepoint. Her income, she said, was often below the poverty line, but she did what she had to, she said, and always paid her taxes.

The ad work came about, circuitously, because of her knitting. The owner of the knitting shop Jean frequented had been asked by a talent scout if she knew of — to quote Jean — “any little old ladies with attitude.”

“And,” Jean said, “the shop owner said, ‘Oh my goodness, that’s Jean Hamilton.’”

The shop owner passed Jean’s number along to the agent, and the agent phoned. Would Jean like to audition for a commercial?