Patricia Routledge: 'I'm a cynical realist - I can't stand all the luvvie stuff'

Putting on glasses to read the menu, she adds, “Let us see what is afoot.” She uses a lot of quaint expressions, and there is humour behind her formidable pose. “Heavens,” she shrieks – well, almost – “Sauce diable. I won’t walk out because I want a good lunch, but it’s not appropriate when I’m working on it.”

‘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?”

Her reply was direct: “Ask your dad” (James’s father is Robert Runcie, former Archbishop of Canterbury). “I didn’t expect anyone to take it seriously, but six months later he said, ‘I know you’re busy with Keeping Up Appearances being a big success, but what about this Hildegard?’”

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.

Hildegard, the tenth of ten children, was sent by her parents to a monastery when she was eight as a gift to God.

“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.”

Hildegard founded convents at Rupertsberg, on the Rhine near Bingen, and at Eibingen on the opposite bank before she died at the age of 81. Her heart and tongue are preserved in a golden reliquary in the parish church at Rüdesheim. So why is filming taking place here in Canterbury?

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.”

In preparation for the part, she went on a 24-hour retreat to a Benedictine nunnery. “It was one of the most wonderful experiences of my life, and I shall go again. You might think it’s a cocooned world, but when you hear the nuns praying for the world you realise they’ve hit the bull’s-eye because of their ‘direct line’ to the Almighty.

“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...”

Does she have a “direct line”, I wonder? “Oh, dear. I'd prefer not to answer. Occasionally you’re in a receptive mood, with your antennae out, tuned to the right hi-fi indicator. I’m a believer, a bit of a searcher. I sloughed off as a student because I wanted to rid myself of cosy props – Methodist Sunday school and the church choir — and start with a clean piece of paper.

“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.”

She remembers walking once night at university and thinking with horror that out of a class of 20 pupils only one could be as passionate about Shakespeare as she was. “I couldn’t bear it. At the same time I began to get that ‘tug’ during plays at university, the realisation that on stage I was making use of my intense intelligence.

"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."

Her early mentors were a couple of excellent teachers, her mother (“it broke her heart when I left at 23, but she knew I had to go, and instigated it”), and an Irish grandmother “full of drama”. She practised her death for us so brilliantly we were in tears. She suffered from pernicious anaemia and had to eat raw liver sandwiches, and would make sure we were round the bed to let us know what agony it was. She took out her teeth to make herself look even more ill. Come the moment she was sailing through the pearly gates, she was magnificent because she’d rehearsed so much. I think she influenced me a lot — the imagination, humour, a little touch of anarchy...”

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.”

At first she wanted to be a singer but she turned down offers from Sadlers Wells and the D’Oyly Carte opera company. “Music has made my life much more interesting, but I don’t think I was good enough to be at the top. I’d hate to have been an ensemble player.”

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.”

More recently she played Netty Fowler in the RSC version of Carousel. “That was thrilling. The well-sung musical went out with Hair. Since then you've had to bash your way through the sound barrier.”

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.

"I can't stand all the 'luvvie' stuff. It's a great danger. When you're dealing in vulnerable emotions that you can't switch on and off and are bunched up with others, you have to find a means of communication. Some find the 'luwie' formula helps."

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.”

This summer she is acting at Chichester, where she has a home, and another series of Keeping Up Appearances is planned for next year. “I’m amazed and astonished by the way it has touched a pulse. I make myself watch it because I think I ought to know what I’m perpetrating…”

She 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.

"And the letters I get - one recently from an old lady who'd been to hospital for a check-up and the news was bad. She wrote saying her husband had died several years earlier, and she returned to her empty home feeling very low. In the evening she turned on the telly - and she wrote, 'There you were. It made me happy'. That is worth everything."

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