Years after retiring from acting, Keeping Up Appearances star Patricia Routledge is still going strong as her 96th birthday approaches.

Veteran British actress Dame Patricia Routledge made a rare appearance on social media recently, still going strong just two months shy of her 96th birthday and years after largely retiring from the public eye.

The prolific television and stage star, best known to Australian audiences for her starring role in the classic 90s sitcom Keeping Up Appearances, popped up on a British chef’s Instagram, after she was a guest in his restaurant.

Chef and restaurant owner Michael Newton-Young shared the photo taken at his restaurant Chez Moi in the English seaside town of Bognor Regis, near the city of Chicester where Routledge lives.

Newton-Young was full of praise for the actress to local news outlet The Argus, which reported that the restaurant was opened specially for Dame Routledge.

He told the outlet that the Dame, who retired from acting around a decade ago, was “bright as a button – brilliant and lovely. She’s completely compos mentis – sharp as a tack.”

Routledge hasn’t played a character on TV since the 2001 television film, Anybody’s Nightmare, while her last stage role was in a 2014 Chicester production of Oscar Wilde’s An Ideal Husband.

Early last year, fans got a rare update from the then-93-year-old in a documentary special about her most famous TV show, titled Keeping Up Appearances: 30 Years of Laughs.

Routledge played snobby social climber Hyacinth Bucket in the beloved BBC sitcom, which ran for five seasons from 1990.

She was in her early 60s when she took on the role, but her hilarious turn as Hyacinth reignited her career and turned her into an international TV star, including here in Australia where the program aired on the ABC.

In a 2001 interview with The Telegraph, Routledge, who never married or had children, said her acting career had been her main focus in life.

“I didn’t make a decision not to be married and not to be a mother. Life just turned out like that because my involvement in acting was so total,” she told the publication.

Routledge is one of only two surviving main cast members from Keeping Up Appearances: Clive Swift, who played her long-suffering husband Richard, died in 2019 aged 82.

Shirley Stelfox, who played her vampy sister Rose, died in 2015 aged 74, while Geoffrey Hughes who played Onslow died in 2012 aged 68.

More recently, Josephine Tewson who played nervous neighbour Elizabeth died in 2022 aged 91.

Judy Cornwell, who played Daisy in the show, is still alive and is now aged 84.