For years I thought Felicity Kendal’s Barbara Good was the star of The Good Life. I was wrong. Dame Penelope Keith, who has died aged 86, stole the series. It was Keith’s magnificently disapproving Margo Leadbetter, forever appalled by homemade wine, muddy boots and suburban self-sufficiency, who proved impossible to shake.
The scripts gave her some wonderfully acerbic lines, but scripts alone don’t explain why her words still crackle half a century on. She delivered them with a precision and conviction that made them unmistakably hers. And the voice. Not merely clipped: it had weight, and the unhurried assurance of someone long accustomed to being listened to. Even her put-downs arrived beautifully enunciated. A look. A pause. Then a line so certain it landed like a judge passing sentence. She could reduce another character to dust without once sounding less than impeccably polite.
What made Margo unforgettable, though, was not only her gift for withering the people around her. Keith refused to play her as a caricature. Beneath the social anxiety, the impossible standards and the perfectly manicured borders was a woman who loved deeply. You laughed at Margo; Keith made sure you understood her too. The marriage to Jerry remains one of television’s most convincing: they exasperated each other endlessly, and the adoration underneath was never once in doubt.
The danger for an actor with her voice, her height, her bearing was a lifetime casting as “the posh woman.” In one sense that is precisely what happened. Yet she returned to those women – Audrey Forbes-Hamilton in To the Manor Born, and so many others on stage and screen – and made each one distinct: formidable, exasperating, vulnerable, lonely, unexpectedly warm, often inside a single episode. She never settled for a stereotype; she found the woman underneath and gave her intelligence, dignity and a private ache. She understood that the funniest characters are the ones who never suspect they’re being funny but believe, to their bones, that they’re right.
Away from the camera Keith had no appetite for celebrity. She gave years to the Actors’ Benevolent Fund, championing the profession that had made her, and later turned into a companionable guide to Britain’s villages and country houses. It suited her. She had become one of those performers whose company an audience wants, whatever the nominal subject.
My husband has been making the argument for years that Penelope Keith, not Felicity Kendal, was the sexy one in The Good Life. Increasingly, I think he’s right. She made authority attractive. It was there in the exactness of her speech, the intelligence behind a single glance, the way she occupied a scene as though no one had thought to question her place there. She belonged to a generation who understood that comedy is a matter of rhythm as much as it is dialogue. Keith never winked at us. She trusted the writing, trusted the pauses, trusted us to catch the absurdity for ourselves.
There will be many tributes today celebrating Dame Penelope Keith’s remarkable career. Mine keeps returning to that voice. Rich, commanding, unmistakable. Before she’d reached the punchline, you knew who was in charge.
[Further reading: The shame of the Frida Kahlo industry]
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Subscribe here to commentPenelope Keith was brilliant – I remember her in an advert for Parket pens, I think, as the teacher at a posh girls finishing school. She was teaching them to write cheques……’the noughts just roll off the pen!’ Wonderful!
It was a brilliant 30 second encapsulation of what she did do well – the sinker came at the very end when one of the not very bright but terribly nice ‘gels’ at the finishing schools asks Keith whether one spells pence with an s or a c? A brief moment, an imperceptibly raised eyebrow and then “I don’t think you need to worry about that, my dear”
Classic, elegant copywriting and a classic piece of acting to deliver it.
I have recently discovered Penelope Keith as Agatha Raisin on audio-books. She is marvellously funny again.