Patricia Routledge, the Tony Award-winning British actress and singer who brought an insistent dignity to roles that included Lady Bracknell, English monarchs and a pretentious, pratfall-prone English housewife, died on Oct 3 in Chichester, England. She was 96.

Her agent, Max Massenbach, said she died in her sleep after a short illness.

Routledge was best known to British audiences as Hyacinth Bucket (who insisted on pronouncing her last name “Bouquet”), the relentless social climber on the BBC comedy series Keeping Up Appearances. But from the beginning, she was a stage performer and an acclaimed one.

Routledge won a Tony for best actress in a musical, for her 1968 Broadway performance in Darling Of The Day (a tie with Leslie Uggams, for Hallelujah, Baby!) and its British equivalent, the Laurence Olivier Award, as the Old Lady in a 1988 production of Candide at the Old Vic in London.

Critics sometimes went to extremes in their praise.

Writing in The New York Times about Darling Of The Day, set in Edwardian England, Walter Kerr described her performance as the well-to-do widow Alice Challice “the most spectacular, most scrumptious, most embraceable musical comedy debut since Beatrice Lillie and Gertrude Lawrence came to this country as a package”.

Fans might have written something similar about her work in Keeping Up Appearances, which ran in Britain from 1990 to 1995 and first appeared on American television in 1993.

On that series, her character was a stout, snobby, middle-age suburbanite who was fond of pearls and floral print dresses and who aspired to higher status. She objected to her long-suffering husband’s perspiring when he gardened, called her dinners “candlelight suppers” and loved telling people, “I’m going into town with a relative of a baronet”. When she began receiving wrong-number calls intended for a Chinese takeout restaurant, she insisted that her husband “ring the ambassador”.

It was during the run of Appearances, in 1993, that she was named an Officer of th...