Patricia Routledge was an actor of uncommon versatility equally at home in musicals, the classics and modern drama. But, if one had to seize on a defining quality, it was her ability to see the humanity in a variety of eccentrics and outsiders. That was true whether she was playing the absurdly pretentious Hyacinth Bucket (“pronounced bouquet”) in TV’s Keeping Up Appearances or Mrs Malaprop in Sheridan’s The Rivals. When she played the latter at the opening of Manchester’s Royal Exchange in 1976, Irving Wardle wrote that her performance was the evening’s highlight in that she gave us “not a grotesque old dragon but a giggling, would-be merry widow”.
Routledge told Michael Parkinson that, for her, acting was “not only about observing but also about absorbing people – I listen a lot”. You saw the results of that in her consummate performances in Alan Bennett’s Talking Heads which she played both on television and, in 1992, on the London stage. In A Woman of No Importance she was a supposedly indispensable clerical worker who ends up in hospitalised solitude: so harrowing was her performance that Frank Rich in the New York Times compared it to Winnie in Beckett’s Happy Days. In A Lady of Letters, Routledge played a letter-writing busybody who finds a companionship in jail that she had never known in the outside world. What was striking in both cases was Routledge’s profound understanding of loners and solitaries.
