Farewell to the Good Life for Penelope Keith: Her cruel stepfather put her off men - then she had a coup de foudre at the stage door!

Much of the comedy revolved around her hapless attempts to manage on a budget, with just one butler to help her cope with the torments of ordinary life such as laundrettes and bus timetables. 

But the real appeal lay in the romance as her antipathy thawed towards nouveau riche Richard. The final episode in 1981 drew 24 million viewers to watch them get married.

By now, Penelope was regarded as Britain's most blue-blooded actress. She could count among her greatest fans the Queen, who thought her so funny that – after The Good Life ended – the cast reassembled for one more episode, by royal appointment, with Her Majesty in the live audience.

Few were surprised when Keith was made a dame in 2014. Her actual social background, growing up in Clapham, south-west London, was more complicated. Her womanising father, an army major, left her mother within a year of her birth in 1940. She never saw him again.

She acquired that plummy accent from the nuns who taught her at the convent boarding school in Seaford, East Sussex, where she was sent aged just six.

Her mother Connie worked during the summer as a hostess at a hotel in Clacton-on-Sea, organising events for guests. When Connie remarried, eight-year-old Penelope Hatfield became a Keith.

She loathed her stepfather and always spoke of him through clenched teeth: 'I realised when I was very young that he didn't like me. He wasn't the nicest man in the world. 

'But I believe in surmounting the past, and that you grow as a person in spite of what happened to you early on, not because of it.'

She applied to acting schools and, despite being rejected for being too tall at 5 ft 10 in, forced her way into repertory theatre before joining the Royal Shakespeare Company in 1963. 

For years, she paid her dues, once performing to a theatre audience of just eight people, while taking one-off roles in series such as The Avengers and Dixon Of Dock Green.

In 1974, performing at the Globe Theatre in The Norman Conquests by Alan Ayckbourn, she attracted the attention of BBC producer John Howard Davies – though perhaps it was her stage co-star Felicity Kendal who really caught his eye, since he suggested them both for The Good Life.

Within a couple of years, she was being hailed as 'the funniest woman in the West End'.

In 1976, while giving readings of Jane Austen's letters at the Chichester Festival Theatre, she smiled at a policeman backstage on security duty. 

Instantly smitten, and assuming she was flirting with him, he knocked on her dressing-room door. 'I smile at everyone!' she protested, but they were married within 18 months.

Showbiz cynics said it wouldn't last: she was nearly 40, her husband Roddy Timson was twice divorced and several years her junior. 

But domestic bliss suited her: she did the cleaning and the washing up, he managed her career and picked her up at the stage door after every performance. After ten years together, they adopted two sons.

'He's a total rock,' she said. 'We were very lucky meeting when we did. We are part of each other – we don't really go anywhere without each other, mainly because I'd rather be with him than anybody.' Her husband and sons survive her.

In 1984, a yellow rose was named after her. An avid gardener, she once declared: 'I save my orange peel for compost, so why not my ashes for my roses? Can't bear waste!' 

What could be more fitting for the end to a Good Life?