Penelope Keith, who has died aged 86, became justly famous for displaying a classy hauteur laced with mischief in TV sitcoms such as *The Good Life* and *To the Manor Born*. But a colleague from her early days at Lincoln Theatre Royal can vouch that the sophisticated comic technique was no act: he recalls her surveying a voluminous exhibition of paintings in the theatre foyer and magisterially commenting, “Busy lady!” before sweeping out. Such style and assurance in a 23-year-old was rare.

The mischief was also there from the start. At the RSC in the early 1960s, she gained notoriety even as one of the crowd in *Julius Caesar*: when Mark Antony urged the citizens to lend him their ears, her voice pierced the throng with a cry of “Ave an ear then.” She was clearly destined for bigger things, and indeed starred as an acid-tongued murderee in the first play the Guardian critic reviewed in 1971.