R.I.P. Pat Keen

[Reza]

Pat Keen

By: Richard Anthony Baker

Published - 12:42pm - Wednesday, April 24, 2013


For nearly 50 years, the actor Pat Keen took a wide range of supporting roles on television and in theatre productions staged all over Britain.

At the age of 18, she was given a job at the Foreign Office largely as a result of her ability to speak colloquial French to a high standard. But two years later she enrolled at the Central School of Speech and Drama and, on graduating, joined the Oxford Playhouse company.

She made her West End debut in 1960 in the original stage production of A Man for All Seasons at the Globe Theatre (now the Gielgud) with Paul Scofield playing Sir Thomas More. Two years later, as part of the Bristol Old Vic company, she joined a 14-week tour of Pakistan, India and Ceylon. In the same year, John Schlesinger cast her in his first major film, an adaptation of Stan Barstow's novel A Kind of Loving.

With the Manchester Library Theatre, she appeared in A Midsummer Night's Dream and played Lydia Languish in Sheridan's The Rivals in 1966. Moving to Ipswich, she was seen at the Arts Theatre in Chekhov's Three Sisters and Alice Through the Looking Glass (1967-68), in which she played the White Queen.

In 1967, together with John Inman, she joined a tour of Wedding Fever, starring Sid James, and then toured in the comedy Don't Tell the Wife, with Jack Douglas, which took her to South Africa.

At the Nottingham Playhouse in 1976, Keen appeared in the Irving Berlin musical Annie Get Your Gun. She was also seen in an adaptation of Nicholas Nickleby at Stratford-upon-Avon and, in the cinema, playing an anxious mother in the John Cleese comedy Clockwise (1986). Other films in which she appeared were Without a Clue (1988), starring Michael Caine and Ben Kingsley, and Richard Attenborough's Shadowlands (1993).

On television, she was seen in The Prisoner, Fawlty Towers, Yes, Minister and Are You Being Served?, besides appearing in Casualty as two different characters, both of whom died.

Pat Keen, who was born on October 21, 1933, died on March 1, aged 79.