At the height of her fame as a suburban snob in 1970s sitcom The Good Life, actress Penelope Keith claimed everyone who met her wanted to know three things: how old was she, why wasn’t she married, and was she ‘a prize bitch’?When chat-show host Michael Parkinson put exactly those questions to her, Miss Keith’s 1,000-watt smile didn’t flicker. She was perpetually 21, she said. She’d never had time to marry. And she was only ‘a prize bitch’ on Mondays.That blend of impish humour and stout good sense shone through all the TV characters she portrayed. Keith, whose death aged 86 from cancer was announced yesterday, seemed so unshakably decent and practical that, even when she was playing the most appalling dragons, audiences would forgive her anything.What she didn’t tell Parky in 1977 was that a lonely, rackety childhood with a stepfather who detested her had left her wary of ever trusting any man enough to fall in love with him. And what she could not have guessed was that, within months of that talk show, she would meet her soulmate – and spend the rest of her life extolling the joys of marriage to every journalist who interviewed her.’It must be hell to live without anybody,’ she told the Daily Mail 25 years later. ‘I did it for a long time – and this is so much better!’ It was announced yesterday that Penelope Keith had died from cancer aged 86 Penelope, second from right, made her name as a suburban snob on 1970s sitcom The Good Life Penelope with her police officer husband Rodney Timson in December 1978Though she wouldn’t admit it, she was 35 when she made her name in The Good Life.Launched in 1975 and set in the commuter town of Surbiton, the comedy starred Richard Briers as a fed-up office drone called Tom Good who, with his adoring wife Barbara (Felicity Kendal), decides to turn his garden into a smallholding and live off the land.His next-door neighbour and former boss Jerry (Paul Eddington) is baffled – but it’s Penelope, as his wife Margo Leadbetter, who is truly appalled and aghast.Margo, whose accent is as cut-glass as her John Lewis sherry decanter, judges life by its minutiae: the wax shine on her car, the neatness of the stripes on her lawn. To find herself looking over the garden fence at an actual pigsty is unbearable.In the pilot episode, Margo was just a voice off-camera, and she remained a peripheral character until writers John Esmonde and Bob Larbey needed to pad a script to make it a couple of minutes longer. They wrote a scene as filler, with Margo on the phone, and realised they’d hit comedy gold – vain but vulnerable, imperious but innocent, she was instantly the funniest thing in the show.Teasing Margo became the long-running game for her neighbours, made all the funnier by the suspicion that, horrified though she was at Tom’s antics, she secretly fancied him.This theme was magnified in her next hit series, To The Manor Born, opposite co-star Peter Bowles. Dame Penelope Keith and her husband Rodney Timson at the Duchess of Kent’s funeral at Westminster Cathedral in September 2025 – believed to be the last time she was seen in public Within a couple of years of starting the show, Penelope was being hailed as ‘the funniest woman in the West End’. A sizzling chemistry between the duo was obvious from the start. She played Audrey fforbes-Hamilton, a widow obliged to sell her country estate to flash and flirtatious supermarket magnate Richard DeVere.Much of the comedy revolved around her hapless attempts to manage on a budget, with just one butler to help her cope with the torments of ordinary life such as laundrettes and bus timetables. But the real appeal lay in the romance as her antipathy thawed towards nouveau riche Richard. The final episode in 1981 drew 24 million viewers to watch them get married.By now, Penelope was regarded as Britain’s most blue-blooded actress. She could count among her greatest fans the Queen, who thought her so funny that – after The Good Life ended – the cast reassembled for one more episode, by royal appointment, with Her Majesty in the live audience.Few were surprised when Keith was made a dame in 2014. Her actual social background, growing up in Clapham, south-west London, was more complicated. Her womanising father, an army major, left her mother within a year of her birth in 1940. She never saw him again.She acquired that plummy accent from the nuns who taught her at the convent boarding school in Seaford, East Sussex, where she was sent aged just six.Her mother Connie worked during the summer as a hostess at a hotel in Clacton-on-Sea, organising events for guests. When Connie remarried, eight-year-old Penelope Hatfield became a Keith.She loathed her stepfather and always spoke of him through clenched teeth: ‘I realised when I was very young that he didn’t like me. He wasn’t the nicest man in the world. Penelope sharing a joke with Prince Charles during a reception for the Actors’ Benevolent Fund in June 2007 The BBC’s To The Manor Born Dame ran for three years, from 1979, and starred Penelope Keith and Peter Bowles ‘But I believe in surmounting the past, and that you grow as a person in spite of what happened to you early on, not because of it.’She applied to acting schools and, despite being rejected for being too tall at 5 ft 10 in, forced her way into repertory theatre before joining the Royal Shakespeare Company in 1963. For years, she paid her dues, once performing to a theatre audience of just eight people, while taking one-off roles in series such as The Avengers and Dixon Of Dock Green.In 1974, performing at the Globe Theatre in The Norman Conquests by Alan Ayckbourn, she attracted the attention of BBC producer John Howard Davies – though perhaps it was her stage co-star Felicity Kendal who really caught his eye, since he suggested them both for The Good Life.Within a couple of years, she was being hailed as ‘the funniest woman in the West End’.In 1976, while giving readings of Jane Austen’s letters at the Chichester Festival Theatre, she smiled at a policeman backstage on security duty. Instantly smitten, and assuming she was flirting with him, he knocked on her dressing-room door. ‘I smile at everyone!’ she protested, but they were married within 18 months.Showbiz cynics said it wouldn’t last: she was nearly 40, her husband Roddy Timson was twice divorced and several years her junior. But domestic bliss suited her: she did the cleaning and the washing up, he managed her career and picked her up at the stage door after every performance. After ten years together, they adopted two sons.’He’s a total rock,’ she said. ‘We were very lucky meeting when we did. We are part of each other – we don’t really go anywhere without each other, mainly because I’d rather be with him than anybody.’ Her husband and sons survive her.In 1984, a yellow rose was named after her. An avid gardener, she once declared: ‘I save my orange peel for compost, so why not my ashes for my roses? Can’t bear waste!’ What could be more fitting for the end to a Good Life?