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Between 1975 and 1981, the actor Penelope Keith, who has died aged 86, secured a position of unassailable popularity in two of the biggest television sitcoms since the second world war.

In The Good Life, by John Esmonde and Bob Larbey, she was the overbearing suburban neighbour Margo Leadbetter; in To the Manor Born, by Peter Spence, she was the displaced semi-aristocratic, semi-impoverished widow Audrey fforbes-Hamilton, compelled to yield her estate to an arriviste wholesale grocer and live in the coach house.

Twenty million viewers tuned in to watch Margo keep her husband Jerry (Paul Eddington) – a company executive whose firm makes plastic toys for cereal packets – in his place while putting their neighbours, Tom and Barbara Good (Richard Briers and Felicity Kendal), firmly in theirs. As Margo sought to establish and improve her status in the local community, the Goods were going back to nature, producing their own food and keeping animals. Goats, even. The sight of a wellington boot turned Margo green.

Edwardian crime stories were often dubbed “snobbery with violence”. Keith’s sitcom characters embodied snobbery with dirty looks, not deeds; the actor, and she was a supreme technician, always hinted at light and shade as she developed Margo, especially, from a peripheral start in the series. Keith had a stern but mellifluous vocal delivery and an iron grip on the dark arts of comic timing. The snobbery always stopped well short of bigotry as well as caricature.

Margo and Audrey were always very funny, and not unusually at their own expense. The last laugh was certainly on the latter as she eventually fell in love with her cultural nemesis, Peter Bowles’s sharp-suited supermarket tycoon Richard DeVere, and married him in the final episode. This was, of course, her triumph, too, as she was reinstated on top of her own pile.

It is worth emphasising the quality of acting in both these series, which ran parallel to a new age of middle-class social comedy on the West End stage, particularly in the plays of Alan Ayckbourn. These always started in his home town theatre in Scarborough but were produced in London by Michael Codron with all-star casts, though not necessarily TV names.

Keith’s bossy Margo, when she first appeared, was a clear relation to Keith’s bossy Sarah in Ayckbourn’s The Norman Conquests at the Globe (now the Gielgud) in 1974. Kendal was in the Ayckbourn, too, alongside Tom Courtenay, Bridget Turner and Michael Gambon. When the play was televised in 1977, Briers joined Keith, the only survivor from the cast at the Globe. Norman’s conquests, as revealed in this trilogy of ingeniously interlocking comedies set over one traumatic weekend in different parts of the same house, were those of two sisters-in-law acted out by just six characters, including the pivotal, catalytic figure of Courtenay’s unpleasant and chaotic assistant librarian, Norman.

While Margo’s serenity and self-assurance were a mask, to some extent, for an emotional inner turmoil, she still conveyed a suburban entitlement in every breath she drew, whereas Sarah’s surface social violence – cleaning the silver, said Michael Billington, as if she wished to inflict a personal injury – belied a lifetime’s sexual unhappiness only exacerbated by Norman’s unwanted overtures.

Keith lived out the image of elevated social standing– as high sheriff of Surrey in 2002 and at every level in the honours system – but her background was not “grand”. She was born in Sutton, Surrey, the only daughter of Frederick Hatfield, a soldier who rose to the rank of major in the second world war, and his wife, Constance (nee Nutting).

The major marched off while his only daughter was still a young baby. Mother and daughter settled in Clapham, south London, and then Clacton-on-Sea, Essex, where Constance worked as an organiser of games and outings for children staying in the seaside hotels. Little Penny – as Penelope was generally known throughout her life – was packed off to a Roman Catholic boarding school (though she was not a Catholic), the Annecy convent in Seaford, East Sussex, aged six.

Two years later, her mother remarried and Penny took her stepfather’s surname, even though she disliked him intensely and never spoke of him. She decided, in her teens, to become an actor. She was rejected by the Central School of Speech and Drama in London for being too tall (5ft 10in) but was accepted at the Webber Douglas. She made a professional debut in 1959 at the Chesterfield civic theatre as Alice Pepper in the Broadway comedy The Tunnel of Love.

After doing the rounds in the reps – Lincoln, Manchester, Salisbury – she played small parts in the Royal Shakespeare Company’s game-changing Wars of the Roses in 1963. She also had “unnamed parts” in the same season’s Julius Caesar, but could be heard only too well in the crowd scenes. When Kenneth Haigh’s Mark Antony asked her, along with the other friends, Romans and countrymen, to lend him their ears, she shouted: “ ’Ere you are then, ’ave an ear, ’ave one of mine,” and was carpeted by the irate artistic director, Peter Hall.

She found an early champion in the director Robin Phillips, who cast her as Big Molly in Colin Spencer’s Ballad of the False Barman (1966) at Hampstead Theatre Club and as Magdalena in Lorca’s The House of Bernarda Alba at Greenwich Theatre in 1973. Her first long-running role in a TV series was in Kate (1970-72), set at a women’s magazine where Phyllis Calvert was the eponymous Kate, an agony aunt. Keith appeared in a Francis Durbridge thriller, Suddenly at Home (1971), at the Fortune and partnered Fenella Fielding in Coward’s Fallen Angels – I so wish I’d seen that – at the Watford Palace in 1974.

Then, of course, on stage and small screen, her comparative anonymity was blown. She cleverly exploited the expectations of her public while also managing to undermine them. She never had a series quite as popular as the big two, but in Executive Stress (1986-88) she could bristle for England in leafy Bucks when her husband’s publishing firm took over hers; enter the political rough and tumble as a newly elected Labour (yes, Labour) MP in No Job for a Lady (1990-92); and become guardian to the three children (and their pets) of her estranged son, killed in a car crash, in Next of Kin (1995-97).

Her variations on snobby Margo/Audrey were even more startling in the theatre; though, like many great stars, she was more recognisably “the same” than she was a self-transformer. Acting is mostly to do with the personality of the performer, as refracted through technique, and she was a supreme example of this phenomenon.

In Michael Frayn’s Donkeys’ Years (1976) on the same stage, the Globe, as The Norman Conquests, she was the imperious Lady Driver, the master’s wife in an Oxbridge college, indecorously locked in and undone during the overnight shenanigans of a silver jubilee gaudy night.

She then became a linchpin of the summer seasons, and autumn transfers, usually to the Haymarket, of the Chichester Festival theatre where, in 1977, while appearing opposite Keith Michell as the king’s mistress Orinthia in Shaw’s The Apple Cart, she met her future husband, Rodney Timson. He was a local police officer, posted on duty at a jubilee gala attended by Princess Margaret.

Keith caught his eye in the presentation lineup after the show. Timson, after visiting her dressing room, emerged in a daze. It was a coup de foudre, love at first sight.

They married in 1978. Timson retired from the police force and became Penny’s manager. He drove a hard bargain on her behalf as she ticked off the classic roles: an unlikely shop girl, Maggie Hobson, in Hobson’s Choice, and a less unlikely Lady Cicely Waynflete in Shaw’s Captain Brassbound’s Conversion, at the Haymarket in 1982; a Marcel-waved Judith Bliss in Coward’s Hay Fever in 1983.

Most surprising of all was her deeply felt performance in 1988 as Hester Collyer, the clergyman’s daughter in Rattigan’s The Deep Blue Sea, who walks out of a respectable marriage for sex with a raffish airline pilot in a dingy Ladbroke Grove basement flat. This production, directed by Alan Strachan, was the first West End revival of the play since its 1952 premiere starring Peggy Ashcroft, and a revelation.

Keith was reconciled with Hall in his summer seasons at the Theatre Royal, Bath, and returned to the West End in 2001 in a well judged adaptation of Coward’s short story Star Quality, in which she transformed Coward’s bitterness as the theatre changed around him into an amused tolerance and accommodation. She still hit the spot, though, with the one-line zingers and rampant sarcasm. She was Lady Bracknell, of course, in 2008, and Mrs Malaprop in The Rivals in 2010, “headstrong as an allegory on the banks of the Nile,” streaked with sadness at the end.

As the century turned, she made another brilliant career move: she fulfilled the public’s hope by playing “herself” – with natural aplomb – as the high sheriff of Surrey, and then re-diversified, with stunning success, as a personality presenter of Channel 4 TV programmes about British villages. She and Rodney lived in one themselves – Milford, near Guildford – and had a holiday home in the Black Isle, in the Scottish Highlands. When she talked about such places, the passion was evident.

Her other passion was gardening. She would rather be gardening than attending any red carpet function. She succeeded Laurence Olivier as president of the Actors’ Benevolent Fund (she was ousted in 2022 in an unpleasant internal putsch, arising from a governance dispute, and was upset by it) and served as president of the south-west Surrey chapter of the National Trust and patron of the Yvonne Arnaud theatre in Guildford.

Keith was appointed OBE in 1989, advanced to CBE in 2007, and was made a dame in 2014.

She is survived by Rodney and their two sons.

• Penelope Anne Constance Keith, actor, born 2 April 1940; death announced 29 June 2026