Patricia Routledge, the Tony Award-winning British actress and singer who brought an insistent dignity to roles that included Lady Bracknell and English monarchs to a pretentious, pratfall-prone English housewife, died on Friday in Chichester, England. She was 96.

The death was confirmed by her agent, Max Massenbach, who said she died in her sleep after a short illness.

Ms. Routledge was best known to British audiences as Hyacinth Bucket (who insisted on pronouncing her last name “Bouquet”), the relentless social climber on the BBC comedy series “Keeping Up Appearances.” But from the beginning she was a stage performer, and an acclaimed one.

Ms. Routledge won a Tony for her 1968 Broadway appearance in the musical “Darling of the Day” (a tie with Leslie Uggams, for “Hallelujah, Baby!”) and its British equivalent, the Laurence Olivier Award, as the Old Lady in a 1988 production of “Candide” at the Old Vic.

Critics sometimes went to extremes in their praise.

Writing in The New York Times about “Darling of the Day,” Walter Kerr described her performance as “the most spectacular, most scrumptious, most embraceable musical comedy debut since Beatrice Lillie and Gertrude Lawrence came to this country as a package.”