Patricia Routledge was an actor of uncommon versatility equally at home in musicals, the classics and modern drama. That was true whether she was playing the absurdly pretentious Hyacinth Bucket (“pronounced bouquet”) in TV’s Keeping Up Appearances or Mrs Malaprop in Sheridan’s The Rivals. In A Lady of Letters, Routledge played a letter-writing busybody who finds a companionship in jail that she had never known in the outside world. View image in fullscreen Zestful … Routledge as Nettie Fowler in Carousel at the National Theatre in 1992. But running like a silver thread through her theatrical career was a wide-ranging sympathy for humanity in all its infinite possibilities.