There were times when you felt that Patricia Routledge, the popular and formidable actor, who has died aged 96, embodied the true voice of middle England with its smug self-confidence, disapproval of moral weakness in others and unshakeable sense of snobbish superiority.
Such character traits were, of course, translated into glorious comic flaws in her best-known role, Hyacinth Bucket (“pronounced Bouquet”), in the BBC television series Keeping Up Appearances (1990-95), written by Roy Clarke, in which Hyacinth’s social-climbing aspirations were punctured by her own absurd over-reaching and the impingement of grim reality, in the shape of an embarrassing sister and her slob of a husband living on a council estate situated too close for comfort. Hyacinth was a variation on the traditional stage battleaxe, with oddly sympathetic undertones, as when Routledge, riffling the net curtains, would cut across the horror of a new man staying next door with an aghast cry of, “We’ll have to move!” Clive Swift as her supine husband would grin and bear it and even suggest a delighted astonishment at her outbursts.
In her second big BBC series, Hetty Wainthropp Investigates (1996-98), based on characters in a David Cook novel, Routledge was paired with another meek spouse (Derek Benfield), while operating as a private detective, a Lancastrian Miss Marple, in tandem with a young assistant (Dominic Monaghan) she had saved from delinquency; here was the softer side of the actor, fuelled by an enthusiasm for social justice and a refusal to accept she was “past it”.
Still, like her fellow dames Thora Hird and Maggie Smith, she found subtler, sharper strings in her bow when performing the work of Alan Bennett. A solo turn as a clerical busybody exchanging her office for a cancer ward in A Woman of No Importance (1982) was a precursor to the author’s two series of Talking Heads (1988, 1998) in which she was blindingly good as both a serial letter-writer whose false and chatty accusations of child abuse land her in prison, and a department store clerk in soft furnishings whose affection for her podiatrist blossoms into foot fetishism.
Always superb in the high comedy of Richard Sheridan and Oscar Wilde – she was a resplendent Lady Bracknell at the Savoy in 2001, stately as a galleon and firing on all cylinders in a hat sprouting black feathers – she began her theatrical career in musical comedy and had a leading role on Broadway as early as 1968.
That Broadway show, Darling of the Day, was an Edwardian snapshot of art dealers and pub crawlers. Routledge won a love letter of a review from Walter Kerr in the New York Times and a Tony award; she was an ebullient Putney widow who “kicks up her heels with a bunch of the boys” and marries the hero, played by an insecure Vincent Price in his one and only Broadway appearance. But the show closed after 31 performances, and the new musical which a thoroughly smitten Richard Rodgers said he would write for her never materialised. She returned home to the Chichester Festival theatre season of 1969.
Routledge, born in Higher Tranmere, Birkenhead, Merseyside, was the second child of Isaac Edgar Routledge, a gentleman’s outfitter and haberdasher, and his wife, Catherine (nee Perry). She was educated at Birkenhead high school and Liverpool University. She took a degree in English in 1951, intending to become a teacher. But music was also a passion. The full, rich contralto voice she developed had started at Saturday morning lessons with a Miss Sleigh at the upright Steinway piano she possessed for the rest of her life.
She played Hippolyta in A Midsummer Night’s Dream at the Liverpool Playhouse in 1952, signed up at the Bristol Old Vic theatre school in 1953 and went into rep in Guildford, Worthing and Windsor. Her London debut, at the Westminster theatre in 1954, was in a musical comedy rewrite of Sheridan’s The Duenna. Over the next 10 years she established her London profile in various revues and musicals, notably in the title role of an off-Broadway operetta spoof, Little Mary Sunshine, at the Comedy theatre in 1962, and in a 1963 musical version of John Vanbrugh’s The Relapse, Virtue in Danger, at the Mermaid (and the Strand). Lord Foppington in that musical was played by John Moffatt, and she paired with him again in the Mermaid’s delightful Noël Coward mélange Cowardy Custard (1972), co-devised and directed by Alan Strachan.
She enjoyed another brilliant partnership with Alastair Sim in two Arthur Wing Pinero classics, The Magistrate (Chichester and the Cambridge theatre, 1969) and Dandy Dick (Chichester and the Garrick, 1973). Here again, opposite the visibly crushed and simpering Sim, she was a strong woman, to put it mildly.
Her first television appearance had been in 1954 and she even popped up in five episodes of Coronation Street in 1961, as the cafe owner Sylvia Snape. Before her TV ascendancy, she was a notable Dickensian in the mid-1970s as Mrs Micawber in David Copperfield, with David Yelland, Martin Jarvis and Arthur Lowe, and as the buxom dress designer Madame Mantalini in Nicholas Nickleby led by Nigel Havers.
Her films belonged exclusively to the 60s, and included To Sir, With Love (1967), The Bliss of Mrs Blossom (1968), starring Shirley MacLaine, and 30 is a Dangerous Age, Cynthia (1968) with her comedy peers Dudley Moore, John Bird and John Wells.
In the 80s she was a monologist not only for Bennett but also Victoria Wood in the series Victoria Wood: As Seen on TV (1985-86), opening an address as a self-righteous spinster from Cheadle with, “Hello, I’m Kitty. I’ve given gallons of blood and I can’t stomach whelks.” And in the theatre she was an unforgettable member of the director Michael Blakemore’s crack ensemble in Michael Frayn’s Noises Off (1982), as Dotty Otley, the TV star and principal investor in the disastrous play-within-a-play.
She then joined the Royal Shakespeare Company for just one Stratford-upon-Avon and London season (1984-85) as an embittered “hag in a Lancastrian flag”, Queen Margaret, in Antony Sher’s Richard III, a role in which, “a living ghost of battles long ago and lost … she stretched her remarkable range,” said Michael Ratcliffe in the Observer.
Routledge won an Olivier award to sit alongside the Tony as the Old Lady (with one buttock) in Jonathan Miller’s revival of Leonard Bernstein’s Candide for the Old Vic and Scottish Opera in 1988. In this muted, stylish production, she showed her class in her solo turn and tango, I Am Easily Assimilated.
As Nettie Fowler, she graced Nicholas Hytner’s landmark National Theatre revival of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Carousel in 1992, leading the exuberant charge in June is Bustin’ Out All Over, stealing comically recuperative breathers, and giving glorious voice to You’ll Never Walk Alone while stripping the anthem of its well-worn banality.
Just before Carousel, she teamed with Bennett in a staging of three Talking Heads at the Comedy, and reanimated two of his early television plays in Office Suite at Chichester in 2007. She performed several other solo shows in her later years, including the story of Dame Myra Hess and her wartime concerts in the National Gallery in Admission: One Shilling. She made her last major stage appearance in 2014, aged 85, as a slightly subdued Lady Markby in Wilde’s An Ideal Husband – where else but in Chichester.
She was appointed OBE in 1993, advanced to CBE in 2004, and was made a dame in 2017.
Routledge lived in West Sussex. Although she admitted to being in love once or twice, and to having had an affair with one of her (married) stage directors, she was happy in later years with the companionship of the theatrical agent Patricia Marmont. Marmont died in 2020, and Routledge’s brother, Graham, also predeceased her.
• Katherine Patricia Routledge, actor, born 17 February 1929; died 3 October 2025
