Penelope Keith - Personal Life

Personal Life

In 1978, the year The Good Life ended, she married Rodney Timson, a former policeman. They had met while he was on duty at Chichester Theatre where Keith was performing. Timson, who is eight years her junior, had been married twice before. They adopted two children, who were brothers, in 1988.

Keith and Timson live in Milford, Surrey. Keith has a great passion for gardening. In 1984, she had a rose named after her. Penelope Keith has been President of the Actors' Benevolent Fund since 1990, taking over after the death of Lord Olivier, and is president of the South West Surrey National Trust.

On 2 April 2002, her 62nd birthday, she began a one-year term as High Sheriff of Surrey, being only the third woman to hold the post. She is also a Deputy Lieutenant of Surrey.

She was appointed an Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) in the 1990 New Year Honours, and was promoted to a Commander (CBE) in the 2007 New Year Honours for "charitable services".

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Famous quotes related to personal life:

    Wherever the State touches the personal life of the infant, the child, the youth, or the aged, helpless, defective in mind, body or moral nature, there the State enters ‘woman’s peculiar sphere,’ her sphere of motherly succor and training, her sphere of sympathetic and self-sacrificing ministration to individual lives.
    Anna Garlin Spencer (1851–1931)