It Gives You a Sense of Power: Patricia Routledge, 1929-2025

If you were the kind of kid I was, which is to say something of an indoor kid, the pre-Internet media landscape took you down some interesting paths. On Saturdays, before Saturday Night Live and after my grandmother’s favorite The Lawrence Welk Show, Vermont ETV (as it was then known) showed an assortment of British comedies: I particularly remember Waiting for God, A Bit of Fry and Laurie, and, of course, Keeping Up Appearances.

Keeping Up Appearances had a blessedly simple premise: wannabe social climber Hyacinth Bucket (who insists on pronouncing her surname as Bouquet), a formidable presence and something of a bully, tries to impress someone or other and ends up falling on her face, sometimes literally. Everyone loves the comeuppance of a snob, and Hyacinth was a particularly juicy target, but there was also something engaging about her; you didn’t want her to win, exactly, but you were glad that she never truly lost.

The key, of course, was Dame Patricia Routledge.

Routledge was born in 1929, back when her father’s career could be “haberdasher and gentleman’s outfitter.” As a schoolgirl, she and her class wrote letters to a Norwegian minesweeping crew and their families; she even made “an enthusiastic start” on a knitting project for them, “but my dear, wonderful mother had to finish it off.” She had originally wanted to be a teacher: a “headmistress by the time I was forty, with a red sports car, and romances all over Europe during the holidays.” But in university she found the theater, and her talent was undeniable.

She began as an unpaid assistant stage manager, but by 1952 she’d been cast as Hippolyta in a production of The Importance of Being Earnest in Liverpool. By 1959, she was on the West End and she debuted on Broadway in 1996, winning a Tony for her leading role in Darling of the Day two years later. She was in Noises Off! for its London premiere, won an Olivier award for Candide at the Old Vic, performed in lots more Shakespeare plays and a few by Wilde as well. Her dozens of TV credits included Hildegard von Bingen, a role as amateur detective Hetty Wainthropp (where she starred with a young Dominic Monaghan), a series of dramatic monologues by Alan Bennett, and sketch comedy series Victoria Wood: As Seen on TV. Of course, Keeping Up Appearances was her best-known work in the US, and her most famous role by far. She was the kind of very good singer who knew exactly how to sound like a very bad singer, and she had an incredible talent for physical comedy, both of which were key to the character Hyacinth would become. Hyacinth was clearly a well-written character from the start — “She just leapt from the page,” Routledge said — but it took a deft hand to make her likeable. Routledge pulled it off.

There wasn’t much she couldn’t pull off.

Watch her bring down the house performing “I Want to Sing in Opera.” YouTube won’t let me embed it, but trust me, it’s worth the click.

She continued to make public appearances until almost the end of her life, appearing on television for a commemoration of V-E day earlier this year and an interview in 2023 for the 30th anniversary of Keeping Up Appearances.

“She has an enormous amount of zest,” Alan Bennett said of her. That was certainly the truth.