ATheir broadest and most audience-friendly sitcoms are dominated by stock characters: pretenders, employees, slobs and snobs. No actor has ever been better suited for this than Penelope Keith. Others played funny snobs, but she was a walking example of snobbery. Her greatest strength was her ability to always find a new variation on the same theme, choosing any number of tones and nuances to give each of her characters more life than their authors probably expected.
The biggest of them all, of course, was Margot Ledbetter in The Good Life, which ran from 1975 to 1978. On paper, her role was simply to provide contrast. Richard Briers and Felicity Kendal played the main characters, Tom and Barbara, two self-sufficient dreamers in shabby clothes who were never happier than when they had dirt under their fingernails. Keith was intended to represent the opposite; more rigid and materialistic, and horrified by anyone who does not follow social conventions to the letter.
However, if you go back and watch any episode of The Good Life, you’ll see that Margot is quite often the funniest of the group. Dressed in a kaleidoscope of chiffon kaftans, she managed to complement the character’s suburban image with a hidden layer of playful flirtation, often aimed at Tom. Keith also managed to play her with a hint of personal resentment. With Margot, you feel like a woman who could see what was happening in the counterculture and desperately wanted to explore it, but was held back by society’s expectations of her.
Launching pad to stardom… Keith with Richard Briers, Felicity Kendal and Paul Eddington in The Good Life. Photograph: BBC
The Good Life gave Kit the leading roles her talent deserved, but Margot may well remain her greatest creation. Sitcom supporting characters are often referenced, but this allowed Keith to play to both of his strengths; pinpointing the timing of a comic that could explode lines like a neutron bomb, and her ability to make what could have been a two-dimensional trope feel like someone you’ve known your whole life.
A year after The Good Life ended, Kit began her next role as the domineering Audrey Fforbes-Hamilton in Birth on the Manor (1979 to 1981, with a one-off special in 2007). Again, it was as compelling a premise as a sitcom gets: a bankrupt aristocratic widow is forced to sell her mansion and move into a cottage on the estate, where she watches in horror as its bumbling millionaire owner with new money (played by Peter Bowles) modernizes it.
The role gave Kit plenty to work with, and the commanding arrogance of her birthright was undermined by the helplessness of her situation. Whale turned Audrey into a study in close-minded tragicomedy that was gradually undermined by plot machinations. Although the show was watched by millions, it succumbed to softening the relationships between the main characters, minimizing conflict in the process. But it was a perfect demonstration of her ability to find range within a type.
Tragicomic… Keith with Peter Bowles in the film “Manor Born”. Photo: Moviestore/Rex/Shutterstock
Since then. Keith jumped from sitcom to sitcom. While none of them had the same impact as The Good Life or Born to the Manor, some still have a lot going for them, most often thanks to Keith’s performance. In the 1983 film Sweet Sixteen, she played the romantic lead, albeit surprisingly sexless, of a serious businesswoman who falls in love with a much younger employee. No Job for a Woman in 1990 was unusual in that Keith played a Labor MP, although he looked and sounded exactly like Penelope Keith.
Keith’s last regular sitcom role was 1995’s Next of Kin, a surprisingly dark show about a self-absorbed, child-neutral woman who is irritated to learn that she has inherited several grandchildren after the unexpected death of a son she also didn’t love. As written, the character was incredibly difficult to like, but Keith managed to portray her as equal parts fragile and lost. Like Margot, Audrey and almost everyone else she played, her nuanced performance invited viewers to see the humanity behind the script.
It’s a tricky trick, but Keith manages to pull it off over and over again. No one before her could play power snobs with such precision and is unlikely to ever be able to.