Trivia

From 1990 to 2022, she was President of the UK Actors' Benevolent Fund.

She was awarded the DBE (Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire) in the 2014 Queen's New Year Honours List for services to the arts and to charity.

Her husband was a detective constable with the West Sussex C.I.D. until he retired from the police force to become her manager.

Her two sons are adopted.

She lived in a 17th century mansion near Guildford.

She is an avid gardener and even hosted a gardening show on the radio.

She was the 1977 Winner of the UK Variety Club Award for Show Business Personality of the Year.

She was awarded the OBE (Officer of the Order of the British Empire) in the 1989 Queen's New Year Honours List for her services to drama.

She was approached to play the character Pvt Ffoukes-Sharpe, instead played by Joan Sims, in Carry on England (1976). She had been cast in Carry on Doctor (1967) but her scenes were deleted from the final print.

She was appointed High Sheriff of Surrey, England in 2002.

She was awarded the CBE (Commander of the Order of the British Empire) in the 2007 Queen's New Year Honours List for her services to drama.

Made a TV Commercial for Benson and Hedges tobacco.

At the time of marrying her husband he was a detective constable.

Named Variety Club Show Business Personality.

Won the Olivier best stage comedy performance award for 'Donkeys Years'.

She appears briefly in Radox 'party' advertisement as The Mother.

She studied drama at the Webber Douglas Academy of Dramatic Art in London, England for two years, winning cups for Shakespeare and Best All Round Student. After that she joined Chesterfield Repertory and Lincoln Repertory.

Named BBC TV Personality of the Year for 1977.

Educated at Seaford.

She was a trustee of Brooklands Museum for several years.

After the mother remarried, she took the surname of her stepfather as her legal and stage names.

In June 2008 she was living in Milford in Surrey, England.

She had a small part in Michael Medwin's tv show.

Her mother was Constance N Keith.

Her great-uncle, John Gurney Nutting, was a partner in the coachbuilding firm J Gurney Nutting & Co Limited.

Although not a Roman Catholic, at the age of six she was sent to a Catholic convent boarding school run by French nuns in Seaford, East Sussex. It was there, that she first became interested in acting.

She was rejected by the Central School of Speech and Drama on the grounds that, at 5 ft 10 in (1.78 m) she was too tall. However, she was then accepted at the Webber Douglas Academy of Dramatic Art and spent two years there while working at the Hyde Park Hotel in the evenings.

Her father, an army officer who was a Major by the end of the Second World War, left her mother, Connie, when Keith was a baby, and she spent her early years in Clacton-on-Sea, Essex and Clapham, South London.

Her funeral took place at Guildford Cathedral on 28 July 2026.