Patricia Routledge article in “Catholic Herald”.
Article from “The Catholic Herald” on Patricia Routledge here.
Biography from Carole Jackson:
Katherine Patricia Routledge was born on February 17, 1929 in Birkenhead (Merseyside), the daughter of Catherine (nee Perry) and Isaac Edgar Routledge. Her father was a haberdasher and the family, including brother Graham, lived behind the shop. Patricia says she was a much-loved, “cosseted” child, and every day when she came home from school, she would call to her father, who would come out and see her safely across the road. During the outbreak of War, her father built reinforced bunks in the basement of the shop and Patricia and her brother, Graham, would spend hours down there, doing their homework and playing monopoly. The family slept there for weeks on end. Patricia attended Birkenhead High School, where she admits she was a bit of a show-off, disrupting classes, telling jokes, and imitating people. “I was a plump girl with a loud voice. I used to ride my bike round the country lanes thinking great thoughts and spouting pieces of poetry.” While at school, she sang in the Congregational Church Choir and ran the Sunday School, bringing the numbers of students up from four to ninety-four by “bribing kids with pictures for their attendance books and by telling them vivid Bible stories.”
Although at this early date all the signs would seem to point to a performing career, Patricia read English at Liverpool University, with dreams of being an avant-garde headmistress and spending her summers having affairs in Europe. But her experiences with each end-of-term play began to be very important to her. “I was fully alive and it frightened me. I was in a tremendous turmoil about it.” She finished her course and took a year off to think about her future direction, while working as an unpaid assistant stage manager at Liverpool Playhouse. Soon she was asked to join the company, and made her theatre debut as Hippolyta in A Midsummer Night’s Dream in 1952, at the royal salary of £5 a week, from which she bought her mother a box of Meltis fruits every Saturday. She was still living at home.
Patricia finally moved out of her childhood bedroom at the age of 23 when she went to Bristol to attend the Old Vic Theatre School. She left behind not only her family but her wonderful singing teacher, Elizabeth Sleigh of Birkenhead, of whom Leonard Bernstein would some 20 years later say, “She did a good job!” She made her London debut in 1954 when she played Carlotta in Sheridan’s The Duenna at the Westminster Theatre. She was only 28 and appearing at London’s Saville Theatre in Zuleika when her mother died of a sudden heart attack. Patricia was very close to her family, especially her mother, and speaks with great affection of her parents and with gratitude for her loving and happy childhood. She draws constantly off her memories, saying, “You can cope if you know that as far back as you remember you were cherished.”
In 1966, Patricia made her Broadway debut playing the roles of Violet, Nell, and Rover in How’s the World Treating You, which transferred from the West End. She calls it the play that changed her life. Jule Styne saw her performance and the next year invited her back to star in his musical Darling of the Day, for which she won a Tony Award in 1968 for best actress in a musical. Vincent Price was her co-star. In 1972 she brought the house down with her performance in the revue, Cowardy Custard in London. Following this success, she recorded an album of her favourite songs, Presenting Patricia Routledge.
Patricia has had an impressive career on stage, has appeared on both the large and small screens, and has worked extensively in radio. Her film appearances include Clinty in To Sir with Love with Sydney Poitier; Miss Reese in The Bliss of Mrs Blossom with Shirley MacLaine; Mrs Featherstone in If It’s Tuesday It Must Be Belgium; and Miss Beatty in Don’t Raise the Bridge Lower the River with Jerry Lewis. Her radio work includes Noel Coward’s Private Lives and Present Laughter with Paul Scofield; The Cherry Orchard; The Beggar’s Opera; and the much-praised series Beachcomber by the Way. She has recorded several of the classics, with her exquisite readings of Wuthering Heights in its entirety; Alice in Wonderland; and some of the Beatrix Potter tales.
She has worked in television since 1952, in both comedic and dramatic roles, among them Victoria Regina for Granada in 1964; Kitty in Victoria Wood As Seen on TV from 1983-85 (in whom we see the forerunner of Hyacinth Bucket); Barbara Pym in Miss Pym’s Day Out in 1991; and the Omnibus production, Hildegard of Bingen in 1994. She most recently received international acclaim with her portrayal of Hyacinth Bucket (pronounced Bou-quet) in Keeping Up Appearances (1990-95), which earned her the title of Top Television Comedy Actress for 1991. In the same year the Grand Order of Water Rats pronounced her Personality of the Year and in 1993 she was similarly honoured by the Variety Club of Great Britain. Patricia was awarded the OBE in the 1993 Queen’s Birthday Honours List for services to the Performing Arts. Her most recent honour was to be voted Britain’s all-time favourite actress in 1996. She is now preparing to do the third series of Hetty Wainthropp Investigates For BBC1.
Patricia is well known for her work in her good friend, Alan Bennett’s plays, A Woman of No Importance (1982) and A Lady of Letters (1988), both of which he wrote especially for her. Her one-woman show Come for the Ride premiered in her hometown of Birkenhead in 1988 and has played in venues throughout the UK. Also in 1988, Patricia played the Old Lady in Jonathan Miller’s production of Bernstein’s Candide, for which she won an Olivier Award. She had first worked with Bernstein in 1976, playing the presidents’ wives in Alan Lerner’s 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue on Broadway. Bernstein wrote the solos especially for her, the very moving ‘Take Care of This House’ and the tour de force ‘Duet for One’. In 1992, she played Nettie Fowler in Nicholas Hytner’s revival of Carousel at the National Theatre and in 1994 she played the definitive Mrs Malaprop in Sheridan’s The Rivals at the Chichester Festival Theatre, transferring to the West End. Her most recent theatrical role was as Beatrix Potter in the one-woman show, Beatrix.
Acting is her whole life as she says, “There is nothing like that audience response when it’s working with you – nothing.” She speaks with awe of Alastair Sim, her idol, with whom she worked in Chichester in Pinero’s The Magistrate and in London in Dandy Dick. “To be on stage with him was an education. When he reached that pitch of obsession with a situation, however absurd, there was nothing he could not do with those staring eyes, that jabbing finger, the swoops and wobbles of his voice. Playing opposite him taught me so much.” Anyone who has seen her perform can see that Sim was indeed an excellent teacher as Patricia plays his style to perfection.
Patricia has never married, admitting her expectation of marriage has been too high to allow her to make that commitment and she couldn’t have borne not to give her children the complete love and attention she’d been given as a child. “People have always pitied spinsters,” she says. “We have been derided, as if we had missed out on life. Well, we need not miss out on anything today!” she says with a sparkle in her eye. She has been in love and speaks of a bittersweet grand passion that broke her heart when she was young, when she fell in love with a married man. Not too many years ago, feeling entirely at peace with her single status, she unexpectedly found love once again. But sadly, the love of her life died suddenly of a heart attack. She’s not revealing any names, but says that a corner of her heart has been taken once again by a very special person.
Patricia leads a quiet private life, living alone in her lovely Kensington home she bought in 1969. She also has a cottage in Surrey. She says she appreciates rather a lot of her own company while still enjoying her many friends. She likes doing practical things, washing clothes, cleaning, and polishing wood. She also likes cooking and having friends to dinner. She admits to being a very emotional person “but I keep the clamps on it – you cannot go round being emotional. It can be channeled.” Most easily into acting. “The life of the imagination becomes a very strong relief. I want the theatre not to give me escape but to take me out on the uplands and make me realize that life in spite of setbacks and pain and evil can go on at its best and most enjoyable; above all (and this embraces the tragi-comical condition of mankind) that the human spirit will triumph.” She says she is both an optimist and a realist. Her religion is important to her and she believes in prayer. “I don’t think you can go it alone. There is a positive force for good outside oneself, call it God if you like, that has the strength to turn darkness into light.” She is a patron of St. Richard’s Hospice in Worcester and president of Claire House, Merseyside.
Patricia’s father died in 1986 and her brother, who was canon residential at St. Paul’s Cathedral, in 1989. She says, “I don’t believe in eliciting spirits of people who have passed on, but there are times when I physically feel one of them taking over. I can be doing some quite ordinary things like ironing or getting hold of a pan of sprouts and something in my head will say, ‘That is exactly how your father or brother would have dealt with that.'” Thinking further on the subject she says, “When I approach the pearly gates, I’d like to hear a champagne cork popping, an orchestra tuning up, and the sound of my mother laughing.”
But Patricia has no plans to leave us for a long time yet – and no plans to retire. “I just want to do good work with good people in good places. And as for retirement, I can hardly spell the word. I’m driven, really. The demons won’t lie down.” Which her fans are very happy to hear. We look forward to seeing Patricia Routledge in many more wonderful roles and to enjoying the pleasure of her company for years to come.
Guardian obituary in 2025.
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 Woodin 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.
Comment
Kelly
Is hyacinth still alive