Over the coming months, Dame Patricia Routledge – who has died aged 96 – will doubtless be most widely celebrated for the sitcom Keeping up Appearances and her incarnation of Hyacinth Bucket, the snobbish and pompous northern lady who ranks alongside John Cleese’s Basil Fawlty as the embodiment of an embattled British middle-class type.
The show, which ran from 1990 to 1995, was a huge success globally – “I am big in Botswana and Lithuania,” Routledge jokingly liked to boast – and it earned her a fortune in repeat fees. Perhaps the scripts weren’t top-notch and the storylines were often clichéd, but her performance offered a master class in comic timing and pitching, with Hyacinth’s pretensions never exaggerated to the point that one entirely lost sympathy with the old girl.
Because of her no-nonsense demeanour and crisply inflected northern accent, she tended to be cast as the middle-aged battleaxe in sensible shoes who stood up straight and took no prisoners – the denizen of a comfortingly chintzy middle-class world of tea, sherry and the vicar. The list of strong-minded historical women she memorably impersonated is long – Kathleen Ferrier, Barbara Pym, Beatrix Potter, and Myra Hess among others – not to mention the redoubtable fictional detective Hetty Wainthropp, the heroine of another widely enjoyed television series.
But she was an actress of far greater range and depth than this stereotype suggested. Her ability to hint at something darker and uneasy beneath the bluff, blunt exterior was brilliantly exploited by Alan Bennett, a fellow northerner, in the monologues A Woman of no Importance and A Lady of Letters, the latter for his celebrated Talking Heads series; it also emerged in her subtly powerful portrayal of Queen Margaret in the Royal Shakespeare Company’s production of Richard III with Antony Sher.
She had a fine singing voice too, and at one point had hoped to make a career in opera. Leonard Bernstein admired her enormously, and gave her a leading role in his “White House” musical 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue; she enjoyed a triumph in New York as Ruth in Joseph Papp’s reworking of The Pirates of Penzance; and as Nettie in Carousel at the National Theatre, she sang You’ll Never Walk Alone with a warm nobility devoid of glutinous sentimentality.
People often assumed that her off-stage personality coincided with that of Hyacinth Bucket. I met her several times, both professionally and socially, and that certainly wasn’t the case: she confessed that she had always thoroughly disliked the Hyacinth type, even though she shared her preference for respectability over slovenliness. Routledge was no snob, and far from pretentious – her father was a small-town haberdasher in Cheshire and she was proud of it. An excellent education supported her ambitions; she had a degree in English Literature from the University of Liverpool and was fiercely well-read.
In the profession, she was greatly respected and a little bit feared. There were no airs or graces, and there was no messing with her either. Her disapproving glare could be withering and she was impatient with lazy incompetents or silly fools, but she was a staunch trouper, steadfast, loyal, surprisingly broad-minded and jolly good fun. She could also be generously helpful to up-and-coming talent and was an active patron of many good causes – notably that of the cathedral in Chichester, the city where she happily lived for the last two decades of her long life.
One of her most ardent enthusiasms was the unfashionable matter of good elocution, based in her love of her native language. She relished her presidency of the Association of English Singers and Speakers (dedicated to “the communication of English words in speech and song with clarity, understanding and imagination”) and I often heard her deploring the sloppy enunciation of fashionable young actors. Her own superbly precise diction made her a wonderful broadcaster, and until the end of her ceaselessly active life, she continued to be in great demand for the recording of audiobooks.
The knockabout farce of Keeping Up Appearances was far from the whole story; more fitting would be to remember Patricia Routledge as one of the most versatile and forceful actresses of her generation.