Obituary: Patricia Routledge – award-winning actor on stage and TV

Although she became best known for the award-winning role of the turbo-charged suburban snob Hyacinth Bucket in the long-running sitcom Keeping Up Appearances, as well as the muse of writers Alan Bennett and Victoria Wood, Patricia Routledge also had a varied and illustrious stage career spanning more than seven decades.

Her fine mezzo-soprano voice fitted her for many musical roles, including The Pirates of Penzance (1980), Candide (1988 – for which she won an Olivier award) and Carousel (1992) for the National Theatre. She was equally at home in dramatic roles, such as Madame Ranevskaya in The Cherry Orchard (1975), Mrs Malaprop in The Rivals (1976 and 1994), Lady Bracknell in The Importance of Being Earnest (1999) and Queen Mary in Crown Matrimonial (2008).

Katherine Patricia Routledge grew up in the Merseyside town of Birkenhead in the 1930s. Her father was a high-class gentlemen’s outfitter. Her love of performing emerged during her time at Birkenhead High School, where she enjoyed playing the fool for her classmates, although what she called “my sensible side” was also drawn to teaching. Acting finally triumphed but only after she had obtained an honours degree in English from the University of Liverpool, just in case the acting didn’t work out.
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A short period of repertory theatre followed – Guildford, Windsor, Worthing – before she landed the role of Carlotta in The Duenna, a comic operetta, at the Westminster Theatre in 1954. After that, she went from one London show to another in rapid succession, building a reputation as a performer to watch.

In 1960, when still only 31, she played Susan Hampshire’s mother to great acclaim in the Julian Slade-Dorothy Reynolds musical comedy Follow That Girl. Shortly afterwards, she landed the title role in Little Mary Sunshine, a comic operetta spoof, with Bernard Cribbins. Another smash hit at this time was the farce How’s the World Treating You? with James Bolam, which transferred to Broadway in 1966.

She returned to New York in 1968 to play the female lead in the musical Darling of the Day, based on an Arnold Bennett novel, opposite Vincent Price. Routledge stole the show from her better known co-star, netting a Tony award for best actress in a musical for her performance.

Her first season with Chichester Festival Theatre, the venue she returned to year after year, as well as being her local theatre, was in 1969 when she appeared in The Caucasian Chalk Circle, The Country Wife and, most successfully of all, Pinero’s The Magistrate, opposite one of her acting idols, Alistair Sim. The Magistrate subsequently transferred to the West End.
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Laura Rogers and Patricia Routledge in An Ideal Husband at Chichester Festival Theatre (2014). Photo: Tristram Kenton

Patricia Routledge in The Best of Friends at Hampstead Theatre, London (2006). Photo: Tristram Kenton

Another notable success at this time was Cowardy Custard, based on the music and lyrics of Noël Coward, which ran for more than 400 performances at the Mermaid Theatre in 1972. Routledge brought the house down every night with her version of I’ve Been to a Marvellous Party. In 1976, she played Mrs Malaprop for Manchester’s Royal Exchange Theatre in its opening production of The Rivals, with a cast that included Tom Courtenay and Trevor Peacock.

In 1982, she created the role of Dotty Otley in Michael Frayn’s award-winning farce Noises Off, moving next to the Royal Shakespeare Company in Stratford to play a succession of roles, including Mistress Quickly in Henry V and Queen Margaret in Richard III.

Other notable stage roles included the Old Lady in Scottish Opera’s revival of Candide (1988), for which she won an Olivier award; Nettie Fowler in Carousel (1992) at the National Theatre, London; Beatrix Potter in Beatrix (1995-97); Lady Bracknell in The Importance of Being Earnest (1999); Laura Partridge in The Solid Gold Cadillac (2004); Dame Laurentia McLachlan in The Best of Friends (2006); and Queen Mary in Crown Matrimonial (2008).

With her Keeping Up Appearances co-star, the late Clive Swift, she had a notable success with a revival of Keith Waterhouse’s adaptation of The Diary of a Nobody, retitled Mr and Mrs Nobody, in 1993-94. In many ways it mirrored their relationship in the TV sitcom to the extent that you wondered if it wasn’t the inspiration for the social-climbing Buckets.
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Queen Elizabeth II meeting Patricia Routledge and Daniel Evans at Chichester Festival Theatre (2017). Photo: Pete Jones

Patricia Routledge in Office Suite at the Minerva Theatre, Chichester Festival Theatre (2007). Photo: Tristram Kenton

Being a lifetime lover of music, one of Routledge’s favourite later shows was Admission One Shilling in which she played the larger-than-life classical pianist Myra Hess who organised lunchtime concerts at the National Gallery during World War II, with piano accompaniment by Piers Lane. They began performing it in 2009 – one formidable dame (Routledge having been so appointed in 2017) paying tribute to another – and continued well into the actor’s 90s.

Any journalist who attempted to interview Routledge would attest that she did not suffer fools gladly. One sloppy question would provoke an icy stare and a metaphorical slap on the wrist. Perhaps years of playing the unforgiving Hyacinth Bucket rubbed off more than she would have liked.

Harold Snoad, producer of Keeping Up Appearances, which ran for five series, had little hesitation in casting Routledge. He told the Independent on Sunday in 1992: “There are shades of Hyacinth about her. The desire to be right. The use of the Queen’s English. The one shade there isn’t is the snobbishness. She’s great with the public.”

Katherine Patricia Routledge was born on February 17, 1929, and died on October 3, aged 96.