Patricia Routledge: From Stage to Pretension to Sleuth
Katherine Patricia Routledge CBE (born 17 February 1929) is a Tony Award-winning English actress who is best known to television audiences for her role of Hyacinth Bucket in the television comedy series Keeping Up Appearances. Prior to Keeping Up Appearances, Routledge had a prolific career in theatre, particularly in musical theatre in the UK and the US during the 1960s and 1970s. The honor of the OBE was bestowed upon her in 1993, and in 2004, Routledge was promoted to CBE.
Routledge was born in Birkenhead, Merseyside in 1929. She was educated at Birkenhead High School, an independent girls' school, and the University of Liverpool. She trained at the Bristol Old Vic Theatre School and launched her acting career at the Liverpool Playhouse.
Routledge has appeared in many stage productions, including West End productions of Little Mary Sunshine, Cowardly Custard, Noises Off, The Importance of Being Earnest, and The Solid Gold Cadillac, as well as a number of less successful vehicles. In 1980, she played Ruth in the Joseph Papp production of The Pirates of Penzance at the Delacorte Theatre in New York City's Central Park, one of the series of Shakespeare in the Park summer events. The show was a hit and transferred to Broadway, opening on January 8, 1981, but Estelle Parsons replaced Routledge there. In recent years, Routledge played the role of Aunt Nettie to great acclaim in the 1993 production of Carousel; more recently, in a 2006 production of The Best of Friends (based on a book by Hugh Whitemore) at the Hampstead Theatre, Routledge portrayed Dame Laurentia McLachlan, OSB. The play focused on her friendships with Sir Sydney Cockerell and George Bernard Shaw.
She made her Broadway debut in 1968 in the musical Darling of the Day, for which she won a Tony Award as Best Actress in a Musical, sharing the honor with Leslie Uggams of Hallelujah, Baby! which she received from Groucho Marx. In the New York Times, Walter Kerr wrote that Routledge gave "the most spectacular, most scrumptious, most embraceable musical comedy debut since Beatrice Lillie and Gertrude Lawrence came to this country." He added, "I understand there are some insane people going around this town saying that they didn't care all that much for Darling of the Day. I'd stay away from them if I were you. I warn you: if you don't catch her act now, you'll someday want to kill yourself."
Following Darling of the Day, Routledge had roles in several more unsuccessful Broadway productions, including a musical called Love Match, in which she played Queen Victoria; the legendary 1976 Leonard Bernstein flop, 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, in which she portrayed every First Lady from Abigail Adams to Eleanor Roosevelt; and a 1981 musical called Say Hello to Harvey, based on the Mary Coyle Chase play Harvey, which closed in Toronto before reaching New York. Perhaps because of this ill-starred career, she did not follow the 1993 West End production of Carousel when it traveled to Broadway in 1994.
Routledge's screen credits include To Sir, with Love and Don't Raise the Bridge, Lower the River. Her early television appearances, including roles in Coronation Street and several BBC drama serials, brought her little notice until the 1980s, when she appeared in both Victoria Wood's comedy series and Alan Bennett's Talking Heads series of short plays. She also appeared in the "Seance in a Wet Rag and Bone Yard" episode of Steptoe and Son in 1974.
In 1990, Routledge landed the high-profile role in the comedy series Keeping Up Appearances, in which she starred as Hyacinth Bucket, a one-time working-class woman with social pretensions (insisting her surname be pronounced "bouquet") and visions of grandeur (her often-mentioned but never-seen "candlelight suppers" apparently were legendary only in her own mind).
In 1996, she accepted the lead in another long-running series, the mystery drama Hetty Wainthropp Investigates, which co-starred rising star Dominic Monaghan as her assistant. She has also played several real-life characters on television, including Barbara Pym and Hildegard of Bingen.
In 2001, Routledge starred in Anybody's Nightmare, a fact-based television drama in which she played a piano teacher who served four years in prison for murdering her elderly aunt but was acquitted following a retrial.
Her radio credits include the BBC dramatization of Carole Hayman's Ladies of Letters, in which she and Prunella Scales play elderly women who exchange humorous correspondence over the course of several years.
The Insider, by Michelle Street, May 2007
Back To Top ‹ Previous Article | Next Article ›
