Keeping Up Appearances' Patricia Routledge brought dignity to her roles

Patricia Routledge (right), 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.

- Anita Gates

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

Routledge was best known to British audiences as Hyacinth Bucket, 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, 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.