What made Penelope Keith's Margo unforgettable, though, was not only her gift for withering the people around her. Keith refused to play her as a caricature. Beneath the social anxiety, the impossible standards and the perfectly manicured borders was a woman who loved deeply. You laughed at Margo; Keith made sure you understood her too. The marriage to Jerry remains one of television’s most convincing: they exasperated each other endlessly, and the adoration underneath was never once in doubt. The danger for an actor with her voice, her height, her bearing was a lifetime casting as “the posh woman.” In one sense that is precisely what happened. Yet she returned to those women – Audrey Forbes-Hamilton in To the Manor Born, and so many others on stage and screen – and made each one distinct: formidable, exasperating, vulnerable, lonely, unexpectedly warm, often inside a single episode. She never settled for a stereotype; she found the woman underneath and gave her intelligence, dignity and a private ache. She understood that the funniest characters are the ones who never suspect they’re being funny but believe, to their bones, that they’re right. The impeccable Penelope Keith, by @gerrylb newstatesman.com/culture/202…