British actress Patricia Routledge, hoity-toity housewife of Keeping Up Appearances, dies at 96

LONDON – Patricia Routledge, the Tony Award-winning British actress and singer who brought an insistent dignity to roles that included Lady Bracknell, English monarchs and a pretentious, pratfall-prone English housewife, died on Oct 3 in Chichester, England. She was 96.

Her agent, Max Massenbach, said she died in her sleep after a short illness.

Routledge was best known to British audiences as Hyacinth Bucket (who insisted on pronouncing her last name “Bouquet”), the relentless social climber on the BBC comedy series Keeping Up Appearances. But from the beginning, she was an acclaimed stage performer.

She won a Tony for best actress in a musical for her 1968 Broadway performance in Darling Of The Day (a tie with Leslie Uggams, for Hallelujah, Baby!), and its British equivalent, the Laurence Olivier Award, as the Old Lady in a 1988 production of Candide at the Old Vic in London.

Critics sometimes went to extremes in their praise.

Writing in The New York Times about Darling Of The Day, set in Edwardian England, Walter Kerr described Routledge’s performance as the well-to-do widow Alice Challice as “the most spectacular, most scrumptious, most embraceable musical comedy debut since Beatrice Lillie and Gertrude Lawrence came to this country as a package”.

Fans might have written something similar about Routledge’s work in Keeping Up Appearances, which ran in Britain from 1990 to 1995 and first appeared on American TV in 1993.

On that series, her character was a stout, snobby, middle-age suburbanite who was fond of pearls and floral print dresses and who aspired to higher status. She objected to her long-suffering husband’s perspiring when he gardened, called her dinners “candlelight suppers” and loved telling people, “I’m going into town with a relative of a baronet”.

When she began receiving wrong-number calls intended for a Chinese takeout restaurant, she insisted that her husband “ring the ambassador”.

It was during the run of Appearances, in 1993, that she was named an Officer of the Order of the British Empire. She was later named a Commander of the Order of the British Empire and, in 2017, a Dame Commander.

Many of Routledge’s biggest fans, from Appearances and from detective series Hetty Wainthropp Investigates (1996 to 1998), may never have even known about her time with the Royal Shakespeare Company or her stage roles on the West End.

She was the temperamental character actress Dotty Otley and a harried housekeeper in the farce Noises Off (1982), the imperious Lady Bracknell in The Importance Of Being Earnest (1999), the title character in Little Mary Sunshine (1962), Madame Ranevskaya in The Cherry Orchard (1975), Queen Margaret in Richard III (1984), the confused Mrs Malaprop in The Rivals (1976), the earthy Nettie Fowler in Carousel (1992) and a religious fanatic in And A Nightingale Sang (1979).

Routledge (the first syllable rhymes with doubt) was a favourite of playwright Alan Bennett, who wrote several Talking Heads television monologues for her, including A Woman Of No Importance (1982).

Other American stage appearances included, in New York, the 1980 Shakespeare In The Park production of The Pirates Of Penzance, with Kevin Kline (she played Ruth the pirate maid); and the London comedy How’s The World Treating You? (her Broadway debut, in 1966), as a frumpy 1940s mum.

None of her Broadway shows had staying power, and one – Love Match (her second time portraying Queen Victoria) – never opened in 1968 because of a disappointing Los Angeles run.

Her most notable flop was the Broadway production of Leonard Bernstein’s 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, in which she played a series of American first ladies. It opened on May 4, 1976, and closed on May 8. She looked back on the experience as a composer-lyricist mismatch, telling London newspaper The Telegraph in 2007, “I think Alan Jay Lerner was frightened of Lenny”.

In the same interview, she acknowledged a reticence not typical in show business. “I was brought up not to push, really,” she said. “I’d wait to be asked. And I think my attitude was slightly despised, may I say?”

Katherine Patricia Routledge was born on Feb 17, 1929, in Birkenhead, England, across the River Mersey from Liverpool. She was the third child and only daughter of Isaac Edgar Routledge, a haberdasher, and Catherine (Perry) Routledge.

Patricia graduated from high school in her home town, then studied English language and literature at the University of Liverpool.

She professed no early interest in acting, but a noted lecturer, Edmund Colledge, who worked with the college drama society, encouraged her. After graduation, she took an unpaid job with the Liverpool Playhouse and made her onstage debut there in 1952, as Hippolyta in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. She studied at the Bristol Old Vic Theater School, and her London stage debut was in Richard Sheridan’s comic opera The Duenna in 1954.

She appeared in a handful of feature films, including To Sir, With Love (1967), starring Sidney Poitier, and If It’s Tuesday, This Must Be Belgium (1969), with Suzanne Pleshette. Her last screen appearance was in 2001 in the British TV movie Anybody’s Nightmare, a true-crime drama about a teacher in her 60s wrongly imprisoned for murder.

Although never officially retired from theatre work, she did cut back. “For a very, very long time,” she said in a 2011 interview with The Guardian, “I’ve only done what I’ve really wanted to burn up energy on.”

She never married or had children. She moved to Chichester in West Sussex in 1999, and one of her last stage appearances was as the two-faced Lady Markby in An Ideal Husband at the 2014 Chichester Festival Theatre.

She had high hopes for the afterlife. “When I approach the pearly gates,” she once said, “I’d like to hear a Champagne cork popping, an orchestra tuning up and the sound of my mother laughing.” NYTIMES

Jonathan Wolfe contributed reporting.