She sips champagne (“I began to go on the wagon, but it’s so boring”), and insists on photographs being taken before lunch because, she explains with a most un-Hyacinth Bucket lack of social awareness, “I won’t need to worry about getting gravy on my chin. Why am I being interviewed? I don’t enjoy talking about myself and I don’t want to discuss ‘it’. If I find you putting words into my mouth, I’ll have your guts for garters,” she laughs. “But don’t worry. I’m a cynical realist. Scepticism keeps everything toned up, don’t you think?”
‘It’ is at first sight, Patricia Routledge admits, an unlikely subject for a TV drama documentary – St Hildegard of Bingen, a 12th-century German abbess, no less. It would be a mistake, but yawn if you must. Indeed, when she mentioned the idea to producer James Runcie, with whom she’d worked on a programme about Barbara Pym, he asked, “Who the hell is she?”
So it comes to pass that this Tuesday there will be an Omnibus programme, Hildegard, about one of the most remarkable women of the Middle Ages, a scholar, composer, sainted exorcist, preacher, ecologist, writer, musician, and poet. “I’d never heard of her until 1986, when someone gave me a cassette of her music and I became absolutely hooked on its purity,” she says.
“It was a good way for a woman to get an education,” she says. “The alternative was pretty bleak – to be a chattel of a husband. She became an early feminist and marched away from the monks, saying ‘We girls can set up on our own’. She was aware of the gifts women have, which have been kept under quite a lot.”
The reasons are prosaic and earthly. Hildegard’s shrines have become a crowded tourist attraction, so Runcie planned to film in Poland. When that became too expensive “he did the only thing any self-respecting son of a recent archbishop would do: he rang his father. That’s how we come to be here, using the crypt.”
“Hildegard had that as well, and it brings great simplicity because you’re able to cut away the dross and go for what is essential. All visionaries are single-minded. It goes both ways – Hitler was single-minded, too. Sauce diable to you. I ought to ask for a side order, to see if I get indigestion! I didn’t believe in the devil, but now I think he stalks. Evil is a positive force. I’m sure we all agree with that. You’ve only got to pick up a newspaper...”
“It sounds so frightfully ‘pi’ to say I’ve always had dedication, but another reason Hildegard is of such interest today is that there is a reaching out for things in heaven and earth that are not dreamed of in our philosophy. Even the drug scene began, and continues, as a search for inspired experience. We need leaders who will organise and throw up — sorry for such an expression over lunch — those we deserve.”
Her down-to-earth personality was developed during a happy childhood in Birkenhead, where her father was a gentlemen’s outfitter and mother was proud of being a full-time mum. At 9 she decided to become a English teacher, and she still has a bit of the schoolmarm in her. “I wanted to impart my enthusiasm, and it’s quite a surprise to me that I’m not a teacher.”
"I was frightened to death of becoming an actress because I thought it was a wicked world where talent didn't matter, and the only way to success was the casting couch. I didn't find any truth in that. For your own safety you close your eyes to what you don't want to know. God gave me an acute imagination, and acting brings that make- believe into reality. That's why actors are still children. We're very lucky because our work allows us to do our own therapy, to get rid of anger and emotional rubbish. That doesn't mean to say you indulge."
Sixty-five this year, she has only really been out of work for two months, in 1963. “I’d made up my mind that I’d get out if I couldn’t make a living. I thought the end of the world had come. I know people who call themselves actors who haven't worked in years. You have to be practical and strong-minded. I got a job in the records department of St Mary Abbots Hospital, donned my white coat and had the most wonderful time. My God, I could have turned them round.
“Actors miss out on real life if we’re not careful, travelling by taxi instead of bus. At least my north-country puritanism won’t let me spend too much, although I'm getting better. I buy Clarins skin care and look back to the day when I wondered if I could afford Ponds vanishing cream.”
Leonard Bernstein chose her to star in his musical 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue on Broadway in 1976, and during Darling of the Day (for which she won a Tony award), Richard Rodgers sent her a note on the back of an envelope saying he would like to write a musical for her. “But we never found the right subject.”
Her versatility led her from musicals, to Shakespeare, to parts written for her by Alan Bennett (Talking Heads) and Victoria Wood, as well as Keeping Up Appearances and a British Comedy Award for Best Actress in 1991. But she is refreshingly realistic view of her profession.
A spinster, she admits she wouldn’t have had children unless she could have been with them full-time, as her mother was with her. “There’s both something wrong if one hasn’t fulfilled the biological necessities, although I never think there is. It’s just something I didn’t do, a sin of omission. Suddenly you look round, and think, 'I must have been having such a good time’. Making a good marriage and being a mother is a vocation. I think perhaps our mother gave both me and my brother — who also didn’t have children — too strong a sense of our own value.”
View oEmbed on the source websiteShe pauses, watching for a reaction, before bustling on. “You sound doubtful I should enjoy doing a sitcom, but it gives people an enormous amount of pleasure, makes them laugh – sometimes it makes me laugh, too – and they know no one is going to be steaming in a double bed.
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