The nation’s favourite posh actress, Penelope Keith, is remembering her mother’s anguish for her latest role. Chris Price caught up with her.

In a career spanning six decades, Penelope Keith’s voice has not changed one bit.

“Good morning, how are you?” she said with the same cool poshness which made her a TV star in The Good Life and To the Manor Born. A class act, she has a charming tendency to end every answer with question.

“Yes I’m coming to the Canterbury Festival. I have not seen the new theatre, what’s it like?” she asked of the Marlowe, where she will appear in Keith Waterhouse’s comedy Good Grief. She plays June Pepper, the recently bereaved widow of a Fleet Street tabloid newspaper editor.

“Keith has captured a woman who is facing life on her own, having been part of a unit,” she said. “It is a good play because it has got both laughter and tears.

“The thing that always attracts me is the writing and Keith Waterhouse is a wonderful writer. For a man, he has written a wonderful and knowing part for a woman, which sounds sexist and of course it is. It is also a woman who is not in the first flush of youth, shall we say?

“Quite a few women have said Waterhouse has got so many things right. What June goes through won’t happen to women of the next generation because they are more used to living on their own and coping by themselves. But women of a certain generation, the one just before me, were used to husbands doing all the things like paying the bills and being the breadwinner.

“My own mother, who was widowed for a brief time before she died, said ‘who wants a woman on their own?’ It doesn’t happen now and people of the younger generation don’t understand it.”

That said, Penelope’s own experience could not be more different from that of her character. Her father left her mother when she was a baby and her mother remarried when Penelope was eight.

She takes her stepfather’s surname. “My mother wasn’t like many of her contemporaries,” said Penelope, 72, who has been happily married to former policeman Rodney Timson since 1978.

“She wasn’t married to the same man all her life and then suddenly left alone. She divorced my father and had to go out and work to support her children.”

Penelope acknowledges her mother’s experience taught her much of her own self-sufficiency and self-confidence.

“The fact I have worked all my life makes me strong. I am still Penelope Keith, although I am Mrs Timson. I have had my own career. That is what the present generation has. Quite often the women go to work and the chaps stay at home.”

Since her career began, Penelope has never spent more than about 18 months away from the theatre but when she is not on stage, her other big love is gardening.

“It has been hell this year,” she said. “The weeds have been the only thing that have really gone mad. Whenever we have wanted to do anything it has either been too dry or too wet.

“I like doing plays in the autumn because the garden is starting to die down and I can build up my strength to start doing everything again in the spring but it has been a very tough.”

Margo, Augrey and 20m viewers

Penelope won a Bafta for her role as Margo Leadbetter in the TV comedy The Good Life, starring alongside Richard Briers, Felicity Kendal and Paul Eddington.

That was followed by her role as Audrey fforbes-Hamilton CORRECTin To The Manor Born, with attracted huge viewing figures.

“It was extraordinary,” she said. “To have those two parts one after the other was amazing.

“It was at a time when there was more of a common culture over the land. To the Manor Born had viewing figures of 20m, which never happens now because there are so many choices.

“Programmes are targeted now at 20-somethings or over-50s of ABs or DFs or whatever they are called. That never happened. People did things because they thought they were good.”

Penelope has also won a Bafta for the TV adaptation of the Norman Conquests, and has an Olivier Award for her role in the play Donkey’s Years.

Same city. Different Marlowe.

Although this is Penelope’s first visit to the new Marlowe Theatre, she remembers the old one.

She said: “I think I only played it once. I came there to see something back in the 1960s when it was still a rep. I played there 10 or 15 years ago.

“I’ve walked round the cathedral and the city. The cathedral is absolutely stunning and breathtaking. It’s so beautiful.”

Penelope also did a programme about the KM Group in 1995 called Behind the Scenes, looking at people who work in the South East. She remembered meeting the group’s late president Edwin Boorman and being shown around the paper’s printing press at Larkfield.

Penelope Keith stars in Good Grief at Canterbury's Marlowe Theatre from Monday, October 15 to Saturday, October 20. Tickets £12 to £35. Box office 01227 787787.

To read a review of Good Grief, click here.