Keeping Up Appearances star Dame Patricia Routledge 'looking great' in rare photo

Dame Patricia Routledge as Hyacinth Bucket in Keeping Up Appearances.

British actress and television icon Dame Patricia Routledge has made a rare public appearance, popping up on social media just months before turning 96.

A decade after she retired from acting, the star of Keeping Up Appearances was featured in a photo with chef Michael Newton-Young after dining at his restaurant, Chez Moi.

Newton-Young told the Argus the 95-year-old was “bright as a button – brilliant and lovely".

“She’s completely compos mentis – sharp as a tack,” he said after she dropped into his restaurant in the UK seaside town of Bognor Regis.

He reportedly opened the restaurant especially for Dame Patricia, who enjoyed pork belly and tarte tatin as she dined with her carers.

Chef Michael Newton-Young with Dame Patricia Routledge. Photo / Michael Newton-Young

The actress was a fixture on television in the 1990s, starring as Hyacinth Bucket (pronounced bouquet) in the sitcom Keeping Up Appearances, but has not acted on TV since the 2001 television film Anybody’s Nightmare.

She last trod the boards in a 2014 Chichester production of Oscar Wilde’s An Ideal Husband.

Although she might be best known by many as Mrs Bucket, Dame Patricia has enjoyed a long and successful career on the stage.

in 2000Herald“Theatre is the test,” she told the .

“It is the exchange of an imaginative experience in the immediacy of the moment. There is nothing like it in the world. Orators and politicians know it - sharing with the audience and the manipulation too.”

Routledge then recalled her earliest ambition was to be “a very avant-garde headmistress with a red sports car and romances all over Europe”.

That was soon superseded by the desire to become a singer. “I was a big, bouncing girl with a big, bouncing voice and I loved music,” she said, but acting called instead.

“I look back and it was always going to happen,” she said. “I was always the person asked to play Christopher Columbus at the age of 8 – I wondered why the other boys and girls were not chosen and I decided that they were lazy.”