17 Feb 1929 - 3 Oct 2025 (96 years)

Dame Katherine Patricia Routledge was an English actress and singer. She was best known for her comedy role as Hyacinth Bucket in the BBC sitcom Keeping Up Appearances, for which she was twice nominated for the BAFTA TV Award for Best Light Entertainment Performance.

Routledge made her professional stage debut at the Liverpool Playhouse in 1952 and her West End debut in The Love Doctor in 1959. Making her Broadway debut in How's the World Treating You in 1966, she won the 1968 Tony Award for Best Actress in a Musical for her role in Darling of the Day. She received the 1988 Olivier Award for Best Actress in a Musical for Candide at the Old Vic. Her film appearances include To Sir, with Love (1967) and Don't Raise the Bridge, Lower the River (1968).

On television, Routledge came to prominence during the 1980s in monologues written by Alan Bennett and Victoria Wood; appearing in Bennett's A Woman of No Importance (1982), as Kitty in Victoria Wood: As Seen on TV (1985–1986) and being nominated for the BAFTA TV Award for Best Actress for Bennett's Talking Heads: A Lady of Letters (1988). She also starred as Hetty Wainthropp in the British television series Hetty Wainthropp Investigates (1990, 1996–1998). In 2017, she was made a dame by Queen Elizabeth II for her services to entertainment and charity.

Routledge never married and had no children. In a 2001 interview, she said: "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 in acting was so total." In the same interview, she spoke of two affairs: one with a married man while in her late 20s and the other being some years later with a man directing a play in which she was appearing.

Routledge lived in Chichester, West Sussex, from 2000 and regularly worshipped at Chichester Cathedral. In 2020, she helped raise £10,000 towards the restoration of the cathedral roof. She was a patron of the Beatrix Potter Society and Theatre by the Lake, Keswick. She was a close friend of Betty Boothroyd, the former Speaker of the House of Commons. Her recording of "Climb Ev'ry Mountain" was played at Boothroyd's funeral in March 2023.

Routledge died in Chichester on 3 October 2025, aged 96. Tributes to her were paid by the BBC's director of comedy, Jon Petrie, who described her as an actor of "remarkable range" and her portrayal of Hyacinth Bucket in Keeping Up Appearances as "one of the most iconic performances in British comedy", adding that she "made millions laugh and left a legacy that will always be remembered with gratitude and admiration".

Routledge said of the afterlife: "When I approach the pearly gates, I'd like to hear a champagne cork popping, an orchestra tuning up and the sound of my mother laughing."