Farewell to the Good Life for Penelope Keith: Her cruel stepfather put her off men – then she had a coup de foudre at the stage door!

Actress Penelope Keith, at the height of her fame as a suburban snob in 1970s sitcom The Good Life, claimed everyone who met her wanted to know three things: how old was she, why wasn’t she married and was she a ‘trophy-winning bitch’?

Ms Keith’s 1,000-watt smile didn’t waver when chat show host Michael Parkinson asked her those exact questions.

He always said he was 21. He never had time to get married. And she was just a ‘trophy bitch’ on Mondays.

His mix of devilish humor and solid common sense shone through all the TV characters he played.

Keith, whose death from cancer was announced yesterday at the age of 86, seemed so unshakably decent and practical that audiences would forgive him anything, even when he was playing the scariest of dragons.

What she didn’t tell Parky in 1977 was that her lonely, lustful childhood with her hating stepfather had made her wary of trusting any man enough to fall in love with him.

And what he couldn’t have predicted was that a few months after this talk show, he would meet his soulmate and spend the rest of his life extolling the joys of marriage to every journalist who interviewed him.

“It must be hell to live without anyone,” he told the Daily Mail 25 years later. ‘I’ve been doing this for a long time and this is so much better!’

Penelope, second from right, made her name as a suburban dandy in the 1970s sitcom The Good Life.

Penelope with her police officer husband Rodney Timson in December 1978

Although he didn’t admit it, he was 35 when he made his name in The Good Life.

Released in 1975 and set in the suburban town of Surbiton, the comedy starred Richard Briers as a bored office drone named Tom Good who, along with his loving wife Barbara (Felicity Kendall), decides to turn his garden into a small farm and make a living off the land.

His next-door neighbor and former boss, Jerry (Paul Eddington), is stunned; but the one truly horrified and appalled is Penelope as his wife, Margo Leadbetter.

With an accent as glass-cut as a John Lewis sherry decanter, Margo judges life by the details: the wax shine on her car, the neatness of the lines on her lawn. It is unbearable to find yourself looking over the garden fence into a real pigsty.

In the pilot episode, Margo was merely an off-camera voice and remained a secondary character until writers John Esmonde and Bob Larbey needed to fill in the script to extend it by several minutes.

They wrote a scene with Margo talking on the phone as filler and realized they had struck comedy gold; Arrogant yet vulnerable, bossy yet innocent, Margo was instantly the funniest thing on the show.

Making fun of Margo has become a long-running game for the neighbors, made even funnier by the suspicion that Tom, although horrified by her antics, secretly likes her.

This theme was amplified further in her next hit series, To The Manor Born, in which she starred alongside co-star Peter Bowles.

Dame Penelope Keith and husband Rodney Timson at the funeral of the Duchess of Kent at Westminster Cathedral in September 2025 – believed to be the last time she was seen in public

A few years after starting the show, Penelope began to be hailed as ‘the West End’s funniest woman’.

The sizzling chemistry between the duo was evident from the beginning. She played Audrey fforbes-Hamilton, a widow who is forced to sell her country estate to flamboyant and womanizing supermarket magnate Richard DeVere.

Many of the comedies revolved around his ill-fated attempts to manage a budget, with only a single butler to help him deal with the travails of ordinary life like laundries and bus schedules.

But the real appeal lay in the romance that emerged from her antipathy towards the newly rich Richard. The final episode in 1981 brought 24 million viewers to watch them get married.

Now Penelope was considered Britain’s bluest-blooded actress. He could count the Queen among his biggest fans; himself found it so funny that – after The Good Life ended – by royal appointment the cast reunited for another episode with Her Majesty in the live audience.

Few were surprised when Keith was declared a woman in 2014. Growing up in Clapham, south-west London, his actual social background was more complex. Her playboy father, an army major, abandoned her mother within a year of her birth in 1940. He never saw her again.

She got her hairy accent from the nuns who taught her at the convent boarding school in Seaford, East Sussex, where she was sent when she was just six years old.

Her mother, Connie, worked as a hostess at a hotel in Clacton-on-Sea during the summer months, organizing events for guests. Eight-year-old Penelope Hatfield became Keith when Connie remarried.

He hated his stepfather and always spoke of him through clenched teeth: ‘When I was very young I realized he didn’t like me. He wasn’t the nicest man in the world.

Penelope was joking with then-Prince Charles during the Actors’ Benevolent Fund reception in June 2007.

The BBC’s series To The Manor Born Dame ran for three years from 1979 and starred Penelope Keith and Peter Bowles.

‘But I believe in the importance of getting over the past and growing as a person despite the things that happen to you early on, not because of them.’

He applied to acting schools and, although he was rejected because he was too tall, he forced his way into repertory theater before joining the Royal Shakespeare Company in 1963.

Over the years he has paid his dues, performing once to a theater audience of just eight people and taking on one-off roles in series such as The Avengers and Dixon Of Dock Green.

In 1974, she attracted the attention of BBC producer John Howard Davies with her performance in Alan Ayckbourn’s The Norman Conquests at the Globe Theatre; though perhaps it was her stage co-star Felicity Kendall who really caught his eye, as he recommended them both for The Good Life.

Within a few years she was being hailed as ‘the West End’s funniest woman’.

While reading Jane Austen’s letters at the Chichester Festival Theater in 1976, she smiled at a police officer on security duty backstage.

He was instantly smitten and knocked on her dressing room door, assuming she was flirting with him. ‘I’m smiling at everyone!’ She objected, but they were married within 18 months.

Showbiz cynics said it wouldn’t last long: She was almost 40, her husband Roddy Timson had been divorced twice and was several years her junior.

But domestic happiness suited her: He did the cleaning and dishes, managed her career, and picked her up from the stage door after every performance. After ten years together, they adopted two sons.

‘He’s such a rock,’ he said. ‘We were very lucky when we met. We are part of each other; In fact, we don’t go anywhere without each other, because I’d rather be with him than anyone else.’ She is survived by her husband and sons.

In 1984, a yellow rose was named after him. An avid gardener, he once said: ‘I save my orange peel for fertilizer, so why shouldn’t I save my ashes for my roses? ‘I can’t stand waste!’

What could be more appropriate for the end of A Good Life?