Pat Keen obit

Pat Keen obituary

She was not on the list.

The actor Pat Keen, who has died aged 79, had a successful career in supporting roles for more than half a century. She possessed an uncommon versatility, as happy in Chekhov and Ibsen as she was feeding lines to Les Dawson, whom she adored. For all that she was in demand in later years to play harridans and busybodies, she never resorted to caricature. She believed in the people she portrayed, breathing life into the stereotypes beloved by too many writers of comedy for television. She refused to take the easy route of playing for laughs, whether on stage or screen.

Pat was born and raised in Willesden, north-west London. She left school after taking A-levels, and it was because of her ability to speak very good colloquial French that she secured a post at the Foreign Office when she was 18. Two years later, she decided to enroll at the Central School of Speech and Drama, which was housed then in an upper floor of the Royal Albert Hall.

After graduating in 1956, she was immediately invited to join Frank Hauser's Oxford Playhouse. She stayed for two, mostly happy, seasons, appearing in everything from Greek tragedy to Aldwych farce. Some parts were bigger than others, but she seemed not to care about the number of words she was required to speak. Pat believed throughout her life in Stanislavsky's dictum that there are no small parts, only small actors.


Her West End debut came in 1960, in the first production of Robert Bolt's A Man for All Seasons, as Margaret, the only child of Sir Thomas More, played by Paul Scofield. She would always talk fondly of the experience of acting with that least starry of great actors, who invariably told her ribald jokes in the wings before coming on stage and reducing audiences to tears with his saintly nobility.


In 1962, John Schlesinger cast her in A Kind of Loving, adapted for film from the novel by Stan Barstow, as Christine Harris, a plain northern girl in love with a man who does not want her. There followed many years of distinguished work for television. Pat was the perfect Clara Peggotty, beaming with pleasure at Barkis's proposal of marriage, in David Copperfield (1974) and a startled Miss Pinkerton in the serial adaptation of Vanity Fair (1998). She contrived to be cozily sinister in the dramatization of Elizabeth Taylor's story The Flypaper (1980), in which she played a cheery pedophile.



When she returned to the cinema, it was as Mrs Wisely, an anxious mother on a motorbike, in Clockwise (1986), written by Michael Frayn and starring John Cleese. She was Mrs Hudson in a dotty Sherlock Holmes frolic, Without a Clue (1988), in which the great detective (Michael Caine) is outwitted by an unusually sharp-eyed Dr Watson (Ben Kingsley), and she brought unobtrusive dignity to the part of the housekeeper in Shadowlands (1993), directed by Richard Attenborough.



Pat's early years in the profession were scarred by a sadness that would remain with her. The death from cancer of her younger brother, Alan, in his mid-20s, shocked her with its awful suddenness. He had married and fathered two small children, whom she helped in more than financial ways. She possessed an unassertive goodness, which may well explain why she was so adept at making kind characters interesting.



As students at Central School, Pat and I shared the same enthusiasms, sitting in the gallery at the Globe (now Gielgud) theatre on successive Saturday nights to watch the incomparable Beatrice Lillie making a sublime fool of herself. We must have seen Peggy Ashcroft's Hedda Gabler a dozen times. In her 60s she went to as many of Ken Dodd's gigs as she could, happy to stay in the auditorium for eight hours while the unstoppable genius became ever more wildly inventive. One of the last jobs she was offered was to play a dying woman in an episode of Casualty. "I've died twice in that bloody programme already," she told me. "I'm not going to do it a third time. And, anyway, the money's not good enough."



She is survived by her sister Angela Yeo, three nieces and a nephew.



Partial filmography



A Kind of Loving (1962) - Christine Harris

The Sailor's Return (1979) - Mrs. Bascombe

Memoirs of a Survivor (1981) - Victorian Mother

Clockwise (1986) - Mrs. Wisely

We Think the World of You (1988) - Miss Sweeting

Without a Clue (1988) - Mrs. Hudson

The Rachel Papers (1989) - Mrs. Tauber

Shadowlands (1993) - Mrs. Young

Fierce Creatures (1997) - Woman's Mother