Patricia Routledge - Dancing through the Mersey Tunnel

The redoubtable Patricia Routledge - currently appearing with Clive Conway Celebrity Productiois - was back in her home city of Liverpool recently to celebrate the centenary of the grand old theatre where she started her acting career.
Originally built as a music hall back in 1866, the Liverpool Playhouse a full-time repertory theatre in 1911.
Over the years it became known as a hotbed of talent featuring actors Robert Donat, Michael Redgrave, Rachel Kempson, John Thaw and Anthony Hopkins to name but a few. They must have seen Patricia Routledge coming. She was clearly made of the right stuff.
She recently told journalism students that she celebrated the opening of the Mersey tunnel by dancing through it. She was just five years old at the time.
One of the theatre’s many claims to fame is that during the Second World War it temporarily became home to the Old Vic Theatre Company.
The decision to head north was taken in a bid to avoid the blitzing of London. It now seems strange that they hadn’t reckoned on the highly strategic port of Liverpool ending up as the second most bombed city in Britain.
Ironically Patricia Routledge, now 82, is currently starring in Admission One Shilling - the story of concert pianist Myra Hess who not only stayed put in London during the war but gave regular morale-boosting lunchtime recitals at the National Gallery.
Routledge, who as a schoolgirl actually attended one of those performances, tells Hess’s story while pianist Piers Lane provides the music.
Admission One Shilling is at the Royal Society of Medicine in London on December 14 and at the West Road Concert Hall in Cambridge on January 7.