Playwright Alan Bennett’s best friend and confidante, known affectionately as Café Anne, has lost her fight against lung cancer aged 57.

Anne Davies, who ran a tearoom bearing her name in Clapham for many years, was given just three months to live, but defied doctors’ expectations in order to see the birth of her first grandchild.

Tabloid newspaper journalists regularly sought to put their own slant on her relationship with Alan, but always failed. She had met him in London after becoming his cleaner and then moved into the house next door to him in Clapham with her three teenage sons in 1990.

Shortly afterwards she turned her front room into the intimate Café Anne, which later became entirely decorated in gallery posters given by Alan after trips back to the capital.

Anne’s long-term live-in partner, Rob Watson, said the future of the café was uncertain, but he was considering reopening it with the help of Anne’s son, Robin.

Daughter-in-law Laura Davies, who is married to Anne’s son Ben, said her mother-in-law was a wonderful, larger-than-life woman, known for her eccentricities – and she made “the best soup and cakes around”.

“Anne was a really crazy lady and her café was very famous,” said Laura. “She used to get postcards from people living all over the place, but didn’t have a clue who they were.

“It was a life very much lived. She crammed an awful lot into 57 years. Anne always wore black and nothing on her feet. She loved to write crazy messages for her customers and put them up in the window.

“At first when she was ill and the café was closed, she put up a note saying ‘Gone Fishing’.”

Laura said Alan and Anne were just good friends and she was his confidante: “She was very protective of him and enjoyed looking after him, but occasionally she did drop him in it. Alan is a really nice bloke and Anne was his crazy mate.”

This week, Alan sent the Craven Herald a written tribute to Anne, saying: “Anne, whose parents were Hungarian and came to England after the Second World War, was born and brought up in Primrose Hill in North London.

“As a girl she did a variety of jobs including acting as an au pair for the family of Peter Myers, one of the writers of Oliver! and then worked for the fashionable photographer David Bailey.

“She never talked much about this time in the late Sixties, but in the Bailey household she met legendary figures like Catherine Deneuve and Mick Jagger and, beautiful as she was, she could have been a model herself.

“Through her friendship with me, Anne and her three sons Trevor, Ben and Robin started coming to Clapham for holidays and in 1990 moved there altogether. It was shortly afterwards that she opened the café which became Café Anne.

“Beginning rather conventionally by hanging the odd art gallery poster on the walls, she ended up displaying so many that she ran out of wall space and began pasting them on the ceiling. Soon the whole café was covered in posters and reproductions from the art galleries of Europe and America, the gaps between the posters filled with hundreds of postcards.

“As a piece of decoration it would have been extraordinary in Soho and so to find it in a quiet Dales village was wholly unexpected.

“In other respects too, the café was unusual and eccentric. Sometimes when it was full and too busy for her, Anne tired of the whole job and, telling everyone to come and make their own tea and toast their own teacakes, she would retire to the back room. With such an odd set up and such a loveable proprietor, the café soon had a regular and far flung clientele. Now its inevitable closure leaves a big gap.

“Diagnosed with cancer in August 2007, Anne was at one point given only three months to live, but she kept going without fuss or heroics, determined to see her first grandchild, Lily Anne, born to Trevor and Kate Buckley in September 2008 and then confounded the doctors by making it to Christmas and cooking the Christmas dinner.

“None of this would have been possible without the loving care and devotion of her partner Rob Watson and her family and friends.”

A thanksgiving service will be held at St James’s Church, Clapham, on Friday January 30, at 2pm, Friends and former customers will be welcome. It will be preceded by a private cremation service.