Actress Barbara Tarbuck, best known to UK audiences as Mother Superior Claudia on American Horror Story: Asylum, has died at the age of 74.

Barbara was also a long-term star of US soap General Hospital, playing Jane Jacks.

Actress Barbara Tarbuck, left, and actress Naomi Grossman arrive at the American Horror Story: Asylum Blu-ray and DVD launch eventBarbara with co-star Naomi Grossman (Dan Steinberg/Fox)

Her daughter Jennifer Lane Connolly said she suffered from Creutzfeldt-Jakob disorder, a rare degenerative brain disease, and died at her Los Angeles home on Monday.

Barbara was especially proud of her regional and New York theatre work, her daughter said, including a role in the original 1980s Broadway production of Neil Simon’s Brighton Beach Memoirs.