The comic actor Gorden Kaye, who has died aged 75, was best known for his long-running role as René Artois in the BBC series ’Allo ’Allo! Among the memories Kaye leaves us with is René’s version of Serge Gainsbourg’s 1960s hit Je T’Aime ... Moi Non Plus. In a broom cupboard in a provincial cafe in Nazi-occupied France, René, the hapless, stereotypically amorous French patron, is trying to get inside the blouse of one of his waitresses. They pant, pastiching Gainsbourg and Jane Birkin. “Je t’aime,” breathes the Chigwell-born actor Vicki Michelle, as Yvette. “Say it in French,” replies Huddersfield-born Kaye. “I love you,” says Yvette. There’s a sound of rummaging before Yvette coos: “I nevair even touched you.” “It’s the ’andle of the vacuum cleanair,” replies René.

There, in a three-minute song, is distilled the comic essence of David Croft and Jeremy Lloyd’s sitcom ’Allo ’Allo!, which ran on television from 1982 until 1992. “We did 10 years and Hitler only did six,” Kaye said. Each episode teemed with the tropes of the British sitcom of the 70s and 80s – double entendres, thwarted gropings to hysterical audience laughter, catchphrases and running gags.

Gorden Kaye in Allo ’Allo!

Some critics thought ’Allo ’Allo! was sexist, racist, homophobic and, like Croft’s earlier Dad’s Army, trivialised war. It certainly plundered venerable national stereotypes. But, as Vicki Michelle once contended, it had a go at everybody equally. “The French were randy, the Germans were kinky and the English were stupid.”

It was premised on its characters speaking English in bad French or German accents to approximate, for monoglot British audiences, what French and German might sound like. Hence the catchphrase of the resistance spy Michelle Dubois: “Leesten vairy cairfully, I weel say zees only wance.” Hence, too, the strangulated diction of the British spy Crabtree, trying to pass himself off as a French gendarme. “Good moaning” was his catchphrase.

Kaye was mystified when he was first sent the script. “There was a note from the writer, David Croft,” he recalled. “It said ‘Please find enclosed a pilot script for ’Allo ’Allo! in which I would like you to consider the role of René’.” Kaye worried at first that he was being asked to play a comedy about a female impersonator and her backstage angst.

The creators initially considered making Kaye speak like Peter Sellers’s Inspector Clouseau. “Because René had so much to say, we decided very early on not to make the French accent too strong, otherwise the audience might not be able to translate quickly enough to get the joke,” Kaye recalled. The creators even allowed Kaye to incorporate his native “o ’eck’” into the script for reasons that bear little scrutiny.

Gorden Kaye and the cast of ’Allo ‘Allo!’ in the late 1980s. Photograph: Georges De Keerle/Getty Images

’Allo ’Allo! came about because Lloyd and Croft were looking for a new project after the end of Are You Being Served? Lloyd suggested a satire of French resistance dramas, particularly the BBC’s Secret Army, in which Bernard Hepton played a cafe owner, Albert Foiret.

From this slim notion, Croft and Lloyd developed the comic situation in which Kaye’s patron strove to hide two British airmen from the Germans, while remaining friendly with his new Nazi clientele. In spare moments, he had romantic intrigues with his waitresses Yvette Carte-Blanche and Mimi La Bonque, while deceiving his long-suffering wife Madame Edith, whom he weekly branded “you stupid woman” for harbouring justified suspicions.

In episode five, René cheated death. For reasons too complicated to go into now, the Nazi firing squad fired fake bullets while René was supposed to feign death. At the end of the episode, as the firing squad marched off, René could play dead no longer. “Listen carefully, I shall say this only once,” he said, as relatives gathered to examine his bullet-riddled corpse. “My bum is on a thistle!” René thus survived to endure such later adventures as The Gestapo Ruins a Picnic and Ribbing the Bonk. Two volumes of The War Diaries of René Artois (1988 and 1989) were published at the height of the show’s success.

Gordon Fitzgerald Kaye (a later mistake by a hospital led to his name being spelled “Gorden”) was the son of Harold, a lorry driver, and his wife, Gracie. He was, according to his autobiography, René and Me (1989), a “shy, gay and overweight boy” who found self-confidence and self-expression through acting, first at King James’s grammar school in Huddersfield, then at Huddersfield Technical College.

He first came to prominence as a TV actor as Elsie Tanner’s nephew Bernard Butler in Coronation Street in 1969. He had already made his TV debut as a railway guard in the BBC’s Yorkshire mill drama Champion House (1968) and played small roles in such films as The Party’s Over (1965) starring Oliver Reed. During the 70s, he made appearances in the sitcoms Till Death Us Do Part, It Ain’t Half Hot Mum, Are You Being Served? and Come Back Mrs Noah, as well as the drama series All Creatures Great and Small, and Shoestring.

In 1990, Kaye was injured when a piece of advertising hoarding smashed through his car windscreen during a storm. He had no memory of the accident, but later said: “I was very fortunate to be taken within ‘the golden hour’ to a top-class neurosurgeon who was able to put me back together again properly.” Lloyd, who visited Kaye in hospital, wrote in his memoirs: “I believe part of his recovery was due to his agent getting a video and showing reruns of ’Allo ’Allo! to remind him who he was.”

As Kaye recovered in hospital from brain surgery, a reporter and photographer from the Sunday Sport news- paper, posing as medical staff, interviewed and took pictures of him. In 1991, Kaye sued the paper. His failure to get redress was widely regarded at the time as a disgrace, highlighting the need for a privacy law.

Kaye returned to the sitcom for two more series: “I was persuaded by the writers, the producers and the rest of my family not to close the cafe.” By the time of its 1992 finale, ’Allo ’Allo! had become a global success – sold to 56 countries and popular, amazingly enough, in France and Germany.

In 2007, Kaye returned as René Artois for a one-off television revival of ’Allo ’Allo! and for a stage show in Australia. He was never to escape his apron-wearing alter ego. But he didn’t mind. “Honestly,” he said, years after the show finished, “there is no other character I would rather have played.”

• Gorden Kaye (Gordon Fitzgerald Kaye), actor, born 7 April 1941; died 23 January 2017