DAME PATRICIA ROUTLEDGE created a monster, and we loved her for it.
The actress, who has died aged 96, turned Hyacinth Bucket – pronounced “Bouquet” – into one of the most memorable TV characters of all time.
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Decades on from Nineties sitcom Keeping Up Appearances the pearl-wearing snob, with her candlelight suppers and white slimline telephone, is still as embedded in the national psyche as a character from Charles Dickens.
In Patricia’s own words: “She was grotesque.”
But the actress, like viewers, could not help but admire her: “She was always getting it wrong and slipping on the banana skin, and then coming back and flying the flag.”
By the time the sitcom first hit screens, Patricia had been acting for nearly 40 years, in roles from Coronation Street to Broadway musicals, with co-stars from Sidney Poitier to Jerry Lewis.
She was also a favourite of writer Alan Bennett, who wrote his first great TV monologue especially for her in 1982.
Its success led to the landmark series Talking Heads, in which she also starred.
Alan said in 1998: “She has an enormous amount of zest and brio and she puts a lot of air into the language, so it lifts dialogue which might otherwise seem quite banal.”
After leaving Keeping Up Appearances, Patricia had a second smash-hit with Hetty Wainthropp Investigates, and in 1996 was voted the nation’s favourite actress of all time.
But Patricia managed to keep her private life out of the spotlight.
She never married or had children, and for years refused to discuss her relationships except to say: “I do know what it is to have loved and suffered.”
Eventually, she revealed she had had three great love affairs, including one with a married man, which tormented her as a devout Christian.
She also admitted: “I didn’t make a decision not to be married and not to be a mother -– life just turned out like that because my involvement with acting was so total.
“Now I think it’s a pity I didn’t have children. But I’m not sure you can have a career and a family and do both satisfactorily. I always knew, deep down, that everything has a cost.”
But whenever she was asked how to become a success, she had the same answer: “I say, I can give you a tip. It’s called risk. And if you’re prepared to risk everything, then you can do anything.”
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Katherine Patricia Routledge was born on February 17, 1929, in Birkenhead, Wirral, and grew up in a house behind father Isaac’s “high-class gentlemen’s outfitters” shop.
The family was theatre-mad and Patricia acted in school plays but never saw it as her future: “I always intended to be a go-ahead headmistress in a red sports car who had romances all over Europe in the holidays.”
With that in mind, she studied English at the University of Liverpool but spent so much time in the student drama club that older brother Graham urged her to audition for the Liverpool Playhouse.
She said: “He was the one who said, ‘That’s what you ought to do.’”
In 1952, aged 23, she made her professional debut with the company as Hippolyta in Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream.
Just two years later she was in the West End, showing off her roof-raising contralto singing voice in musical comedy The Duenna.
By early 1961 she was so well known on stage stage that the makers of Coronation Street, which had begun a couple of months earlier, pounced: “They created a character for me – Sylvia Snape. She had a little cafe.”
Their idea was for the no-nonsense proprietor to become one of the cobbles’ stalwarts, but after just three episodes Patricia quit.
She recalled: “I just knew inside that I needed to have other adventures.”
That included belting out satirical songs on That Was The Week It Was, as well as her big-screen debut in 1967’s To Sir with Love.
She played a teacher who offers support to Sidney Poitier’s character, and years later recalled the actor’s generosity: “I just had one scene alone with him, and he gave it to me.”
Patricia had less happy memories of working with Jerry Lewis in 1968’s Don’t Raise the Bridge, Lower the River: “An absolute nightmare. And I’m afraid I didn’t find him funny at all.”
BROADWAY DEBUT
That year Patricia also took Broadway by storm, with the New York Times critic describing her performance in Darling of the Day as “the most spectacular, most scrumptious, most embraceable musical comedy debut since Beatrice Lillie and Gertrude Lawrence came to the country.”
It landed her a Tony Award, presented by Groucho Marx.
Back at home, Alan Bennett had been a long-time fan and so when he wrote his first ground-breaking TV monologue, he wrote it for her.
Initially, Patricia turned him down: the piece was 47 minutes of just one character speaking directly to the camera.
Patricia recalled: “I said it wouldn’t work – people would switch off in their thousands.”
But Alan told her: “If you don’t do it, nobody will. I’ve written it for you.”
A Woman of No Importance screened on BBC2 in November 1982, with Patricia as Miss Schofield, who bubbled away about office gossip and the goings on at a hospital where, it slowly dawned on viewers, she was dying.
It was a sensation, and won Patricia a British Press Guild award for best actress. She later said of the writer: “He turns cliche into poetry.
“He sees a world in a grain of sand – the sympathy, the humanity.”
Its success led to 1988’s beloved Talking Heads series of six monologues, with Patricia in A Lady of Letters as a lonely busybody who finally finds friendship when she is sent to prison.
She said: “It’s about salvation, about learning to love at a tremendous cost. Oh, it was a joyous thing to do.”
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A second series was made in 1998, with Patricia’s monologue this time about a shop assistant who ends up in the thrall of her chiropodist.
In 2004 she admitted she found that part “very kinky”: “I didn’t really enjoy it. I didn’t understand it, deep down.”
Alan said later: “Patricia has a very strong moral streak and very strong views, and I think if a part doesn’t conform with those she’s very dubious about it.”
In between all this, she showed off her comedy brilliance again in Victoria Wood’s series As Seen on TV, playing an overconfident recurring character called Kitty who came out with lines like: “I’m something of a celebrity having walked the entire length of the Pennine Way in slingbacks, to publicise mental health.”
But when sitcom writer Roy Clarke, already famous for Last of the Summer Wine, presented the BBC with scripts for a new series about a suburban social climber, he did not have a lead actress in mind.
He recalled in 2004: “People do assume I must have written Keeping Up Appearances for Patricia Routledge, but I didn’t.”
It was director and producer Harold Snoad who Roy credited for “that perfect bit of casting”.
Harold said: “I wanted the character of Hyacinth to be a sort of stately galleon. I didn’t want somebody lightweight, either in size or vocal terms.”
Patricia said of the character: “She leapt from the page.”
GLOBAL HIT
The first series began on BBC1 in October 1990; soon 13million people a week were tuning in, including superfan the Queen Mum.
Nobody could have delivered lines like her (“I hope that’s a first-class stamp. I object to having second-class stamps thrust through my letterbox”) but she also brought a bursting energy to the role that was unmatchable.
The late Clive Swift, who played Hyacinth’s long-suffering husband Richard, said in 1998: “I can’t think of an another actress who could have brought the physical clowning to the part, which isn’t there particularly in the script.”
It was a global hit, but in 1995 after five series Patricia announced she would not do any more, despite the BBC’s pleas: “There were other adventures to have.”
They included, at the time, a new relationship.
Speaking to The Sun in 1996 she opened up about her private life for the first time, admitting: “A corner of my heart is taken. I’ve got a sneaking feeling that I might have almost everything in the end.
“He’s someone I’ve known for years and years. He’s in theatrical management but we hadn’t seen each other for a long time and then we met again.
“Life is full of the most wonderful surprises.”
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Patricia moved to Chichester, West Sussex, in 1999 to be closer to this new love, whose identity was never revealed, and lived there for the rest of her life.
She also told The Sun: “I had my heart broken when I was young. It was a grand passion, but it was complicated because he was married and, of course, I felt very guilty.
“I would gladly have lived with him and I wanted his children. But I couldn’t do it because I thought it would kill my parents.”
Her second great passion came in the late Eighties, when she least expected it: “Out of the blue this enchanting person appeared.
“He was a theatre director – a very funny and delightful man. But he had a heart condition, which I didn’t know about for a while.
“One day I went to rehearsal and was told he’d died in the night. This dear man was no more. I was just so hurt, so sore with the pain of loss.”
‘ILLUMINATING LIFE’
Work was always a refuge. In 1996 she was back on screen in Hetty Wainthropp Investigates as pensioner-turned-crime fighter, who was a down-to-earth, proud working-class opposite of Hyacinth.
Patricia later said of that character: “I loved her.”
It was another hit and the actress never forgave the BBC for axing the programme after four series without telling the cast: “No word ever came – how rude.”
Hetty was her last major TV role; afterwards she focused on theatre.
Her final role was in Oscar Wilde’s play An Ideal Husband in 2014 in her adopted hometown of Chichester, where she worshipped at the cathedral each week.
In 2017 she was made a dame for services to the theatre and charity.
On getting the news, she said: “I started to laugh, and then I started to cry. It was extraordinary.”
But Patricia believed her profession was important.
She once said: “It sounds a bit high-faluting, but I think acting is the physicalisation of the imagination.
“If the word becomes flesh, then you are illuminating life for other people.”
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