“To me, all the people I play are totally different,” dame Penelope Keith said in 2009. “I’ve been lucky enough to play two of the greatest parts in situation comedy written for women, and that was wonderful.”
Keith, who has died in Surrey at the age of 86, did much else besides. She served in the Royal Shakespeare Company from as early as 1963. She won an Olivier award for Michael Frayn’s Donkeys’ Years in 1976 and a Bafta for Alan Ayckbourn’s The Norman Conquests in 1978. In the current century, she played a celebrated Lady Bracknell on stage in The Importance of Being Earnest. But the commanding actor acknowledged she would be best remembered for two legendary snobs: suburban proto-Thatcherite Margo Ledbetter from The Good Life, and tweedy Audrey fforbes-Hamilton from To The Manor Born.
The late 1970s and early 1980s in Britain are, now, characterised as the era of punk rock, labour unrest and political dysfunction. This overlooks how conservative (small “c”) tastes remained. The Good Life, which began in 1975 and ran until 1978, cast Richard Briers and Felicity Kendal as a suburban couple who threw in the rat race for self-sufficiency. From early on, Keith, as their reliably intolerant neighbour, stole every scene in which she appeared. “Just who do you think you are, Mrs Ledbetter?” an overconfident clerk once dared to ask. “I am the silent minority!” she bellowed.
The Good Life arrived the same year Margaret Thatcher became leader of the opposition. In 1979, just four months after that not-so-silent minority propelled her into 10 Downing Street, the world got its first glimpse of To the Manor Born. Reminding viewers how the aristocracy had been financially inconvenienced in the postwar years, Peter Spence’s series concerned an upper-class lady who is forced to sell her mansion and move into the lodge at the bottom of the drive. Indignity is piled on inconvenience when, in the suave form of Peter Bowles, a self-made millionaire of Czech descent buys her old home.
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Looking back, we now see it is Bowles’s arriviste, not Keith’s old-money snoot, who best represents how Thatcher’s government would change the UK. Whether or not all these undercurrents registered with the public, To the Manor Born became a staggering success.
The final episode of the first series became, live events excepted, the most watched British television show of the 1970s. Forget the much-lauded Morecambe and Wise Christmas shows or (nowhere close) Fawlty Towers. What really pulled in the figures was Keith, from a height of 5ft 10 ins, staring down her nose at lesser beings.
She was right to clarify that Margo and Audrey are not the same person. Though viewers enjoyed the slight sexual frisson between Margo and Richard Briers’s Tom Good, the earlier character is flintier and less at home to humour (more like Mrs Thatcher, one might argue). Audrey is a terror, but, from early on, it seemed clear that she would soften to Bowles’s smoothy. These were two perfectly judged performances from an actor who had an intense feel for comic timing and a keen awareness of her intimidating physical presence.
Born Penelope Anne Constance Hatfield, the daughter of an army officer who left the family when she was just a baby, she spent formative years in coastal Essex and south London. Acting began to interest her while at a Roman Catholic boarding school in East Sussex, but drama schools were wary of taking someone so tall.
“I was very tall and very plain,” she later told Michael Parkinson. “I think this is where the comedy came from because I wasn’t going to get very far on my looks. So I thought I’d better be the gag girl.” Keith had a busy career on stage and in smaller TV roles before that break came in The Good Life. In 1977, she met Rodney Timpson, a police officer who was on duty when she was performing at the Chichester Theatre, and a year later they were married. In 1988, they adopted two boys who were twin brothers. In more recent years, Keith made frequent appearances on Alan Titchmarsh’s Love Your Weekend and presented her own series titled Penelope Keith’s Hidden Villages.
“I don’t know what the secret is,” she said of her long marriage. “I just think you have to be aware of what other people think. Life isn’t about you, it’s about everything.”
