Dame Edith Margaret Emily "Peggy" Ashcroft (22 December 1907 – 14 June 1991) was an English actress whose career spanned more than six decades, both on screen and stage.
Born to a middle-class family in Croydon, Surrey, Ashcroft was determined from an early age to become an actress, despite parental opposition. She was working in smaller theatres even before graduating from drama school, and within two years she was starring in the West End. Ashcroft maintained her leading place in British theatre for the next 50 years. Always attracted by the ideals of permanent theatrical ensembles, she did much of her work for the Old Vic in the early 1930s, John Gielgud's companies in the 1930s and 1940s, the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre and its successor the Royal Shakespeare Company from the 1950s, and the National Theatre from the 1970s.
While well regarded in Shakespeare, Ashcroft was also known for her commitment to modern drama, appearing in plays by Bertolt Brecht, Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter. Her career was almost wholly spent in the live theatre until the 1980s. She then turned to television and cinema with considerable success, winning three BAFTAs, one Volpi Cup, one Golden Globe Award and an Academy Award, and received nominations for an additional Golden Globe Award and two Primetime Emmy Awards.
Life and career
Early years
Ashcroft was born in Croydon, Surrey, (now in Greater London) the younger child and only daughter of Violetta Maud, née Bernheim (1874–1926) and William Worsley Ashcroft (1878–1918), a land agent. According to Michael Billington, her biographer, Violetta Ashcroft was of Danish and German Jewish descent and a keen amateur actress.
thumb|upright|Ashcroft in 1936
While still a student, Ashcroft made her professional stage debut at the Birmingham Repertory Theatre in a revival of J. M. Barrie's Dear Brutus opposite Ralph Richardson, with whom she had been greatly impressed when she saw him in Charles Doran's touring company while she was still a schoolgirl. She graduated from the Central School in 1927 with London University's Diploma in Dramatic Art. Never much drawn to the West End or stardom, she learned her craft with mostly small companies in fringe theatres. Her first notable West End role was Naemi in Jew Süss in 1929, an extravagantly theatrical production, in which she won praise for the naturalism and truth of her playing. In the same year she married Rupert Hart-Davis, then an aspiring actor and later a publisher. He later described the marriage as "a sad failure: we were much too young to know what we wanted ... after much agony we parted and were duly divorced. Nowadays Peggy and I lunch together perhaps once or twice a year in a Soho restaurant and have a lovely nostalgic-romantic talk of shared memories of long ago. She is a lovely person and the best actress living."
1930s
In 1930 Ashcroft was cast as Desdemona in a production of Othello at the Savoy Theatre, starring Paul Robeson in the title role. The production was not well received, but Ashcroft's notices were excellent. The production prompted a political awakening in Ashcroft, who was astonished to receive hate mail for appearing onstage with a black actor; she was angry that Robeson was not welcome at the Savoy Hotel, despite being the star at the adjoining Savoy Theatre. During the run she had a brief affair with Robeson, which caused Robeson and his wife Essie Robeson to temporarily split up. Their affair, followed by another with the writer J. B. Priestley, ended Ashcroft's first marriage. Hart-Davis was granted a divorce in 1933, on the grounds of Ashcroft's adultery with the director Theodore Komisarjevsky.
Among those impressed by Ashcroft's performance as Desdemona was John Gielgud, recently established as a West End star. He recalled, "When Peggy came on in the Senate scene it was as if all the lights in the theatre had suddenly gone up". In 1932 he was invited by the Oxford University Dramatic Society to try his hand at directing, in the society's production of Romeo and Juliet. Ashcroft as Juliet and Edith Evans as the nurse won golden notices, although their director, already notorious for his innocent slips of the tongue, referred to them as "Two leading ladies, the like of whom I hope I shall never meet again."
thumb|left|The Old Vic, photographed in 2012
Ashcroft joined the Old Vic company for the 1932–33 season. The theatre, in an unfashionable area of London south of the Thames, was run by Lilian Baylis to offer plays and operas to a mostly working-class audience at low ticket prices. She paid her performers modest wages, but the theatre was known for its unrivaled repertory of classics, mostly Shakespeare, and many West End stars took a large pay cut to work there. It was, in Sheridan Morley's words, the place to learn Shakespearean technique and try new ideas. During the season Ashcroft played five Shakespeare heroines, as well as Kate in She Stoops to Conquer, Mary Stuart in a new play by John Drinkwater, and Lady Teazle in The School for Scandal. She was not attracted to the medium of cinema and made only four more films over the next quarter-century.
After appearing in the Hitchcock film The 39 Steps (1935), and a succession of stage failures, Ashcroft was once again cast as Juliet by Gielgud, this time in a West End production that attracted enormous attention. It ran from October 1935 to March 1936, and Ashcroft's Romeos were played in alternation by Olivier and Gielgud. Critical opinions differed as to the relative merits of her leading men, but Ashcroft won glowing reviews. In May 1936 Komisarjevsky directed a production of The Seagull, with Evans as Arkadina, Gielgud as Trigorin and Ashcroft as Nina. The recent collapse of her marriage to the director made rehearsals difficult, but the critical reception was ecstatic.
After playing briefly and without much pleasure in New York, Ashcroft returned to London in 1937 for a season of four plays presented by Gielgud at the Queen's Theatre. She played the Queen in Richard II, Lady Teazle in The School for Scandal, Irina in Three Sisters and Portia in The Merchant of Venice. The company included Harry Andrews, Glen Byam Shaw, George Devine, Michael Redgrave and Harcourt Williams, with Angela Baddeley and Gwen Ffrangcon-Davies as guests. The directors were Gielgud himself, Tyrone Guthrie and Michel Saint-Denis. Billington considers that this company laid the foundations of post-war ensembles such as the Royal Shakespeare Company and the National Theatre. The Munich crisis and the approach of the Second World War delayed for a decade the further development of such a company. After the Haymarket season Ashcroft resumed her break from the theatre, first campaigning for her husband, who stood as a Labour candidate in the 1945 general election, and then having a second child, Nicholas, in 1946.
Returning to the stage in 1947, Ashcroft had two long-running successes in a row as the alcoholic Evelyn Holt in Edward, My Son, in the West End and then on Broadway, and the downtrodden Catherine Sloper in The Heiress in 1949.|
At about this time Ashcroft's third and last marriage was beginning to fall apart. According to Billington she found solace in her work, and threw herself into classical and avant garde works "with ever greater fervour". Many were surprised when Ashcroft appeared with Richardson at the Savoy in 1972 in what was by all appearances a conventional West End drawing room comedy, Lloyd George Knew My Father, by William Douglas-Home, but the two stars revealed unexpected depths in their characters.
For the National, Ashcroft appeared in Ibsen's John Gabriel Borkman, Beckett's Happy Days, Lillian Hellman's Watch on the Rhine and Pinter's Family Voices. Her RSC roles were Lidya in Aleksei Arbuzov's Old World (1976), and her last stage part was the Countess in All's Well That Ends Well, which she played at Stratford in 1981 and in London in 1982.
She was the grandmother of the French singer Emily Loizeau.
Ashcroft died of a stroke in London at the age of 83. A memorial service was held in Westminster Abbey on 30 November 1991. In addition to the Oscar and BAFTA awards, she received a Laurence Olivier Award for Best Actress in a New Play for Old World in 1976, a Venice Film Festival Award for She's Been Away (1989), a BAFTA Award for the television play Caught on a Train (1980), a special award from the British Theatre Association for the television play Cream in My Coffee (1982), a special award from BAFTA (1990) and a special Laurence Olivier Award (1991).
Academy Awards
{| class="wikitable"
|+
!Year
!Category
!Nominated work
!Result
!Ref.
|-
|1985
|Best Supporting Actress
|A Passage to India
|
|
|}
BAFTA Awards
{| class="wikitable"
|+
!Year
!Category
!Nominated work
!Result
!Ref.
|-
! colspan="5" |British Academy Film Awards
|-
|1960
|Best British Actress
|The Nun's Story
|
|
|-
|1970
|Best Actress in a Supporting Role
|Three into Two Won't Go
|
|
|-
|1986
|Best Actress in a Leading Role
|A Passage to India
|
|
|-
|1990
|Best Actress in a Supporting Role
|Madame Sousatzka
|
|
|-
|1979
|Edward & Mrs. Simpson / Hullabaloo Over Georgie and Bonnie's Pictures
|
|-
|1981
|Cream in My Coffee / Caught on a Train
|
|-
|1985
|The Jewel in the Crown
|
|-
|1990
|She's Been Away
|
|}
Emmy Awards
{| class="wikitable"
|+
!Year
!Category
!Nominated work
!Result
!Ref.
|-
|1985
|Outstanding Lead Actress in a Limited or Anthology Series or Movie
|The Jewel in the Crown
|
|
|-
|1989
|Outstanding Supporting Actress in a Limited or Anthology Series or Movie
|A Perfect Spy
|
|
|}
Golden Globe Awards
{| class="wikitable"
|+
!Year
!Category
!Nominated work
!Result
!Ref.
|-
| rowspan="2" |1985
|Best Supporting Actress – Motion Picture
|A Passage to India
|
|
|-
|Best Actress – Miniseries or Television Film
|The Jewel in the Crown
|
|
|}
Laurence Olivier Awards
{| class="wikitable"
|+
!Year
!Category
!Nominated work
!Result
!Ref.
|-
|1976
|Actress of the Year in a New Play
|Old World
|
|
|-
|1991
|Society of London Theatre Special Award
|
|
|
|}
Other awards
{| class="wikitable"
|+
!Year
!Awards
!Category
!Nominated work
!Result
!Ref.
|-
| rowspan="2" |1984
|Boston Society of Film Critics
|Best Supporting Actress
| rowspan="4" |A Passage to India
|
|
|-
|Los Angeles Film Critics Association
|Best Supporting Actress
|
|
|-
| rowspan="2" |1985
|National Board of Review
|Best Actress
|
|
|-
|New York Film Critics Circle
|Best Actress
|
|
|-
|1989
|Venice Film Festival
|Volpi Cup for Best Actress
|She's Been Away
|
|
|}
Filmography & Sound Recordings
Film
{| class="wikitable sortable"
! Year
! Title
! Role
! class="unsortable" | Notes
|-
|1933
|The Wandering Jew
|Olalla Quintana
|
|-
|1935
|The 39 Steps
|Margaret, the crofter's wife
|
|-
|1936
|Rhodes of Africa
|Ann Carpenter
|Released in the U.S. as Rhodes, the Empire Builder
|-
|1941
|Quiet Wedding
|Flower Lisle
|
|-
|1959
|The Nun's Story
|Mother Mathilde
|
|-
|1968
|Secret Ceremony
|Hannah
|
|-
|1977
|Joseph Andrews
|Lady Tattle
|
|-
| 1939
| Twelfth Night
|Viola
|
|-
|1959
|BBC Sunday-Night Theatre
|Julia Rajk
|Episode: Shadow of Heroes
|-
|1962
|The Cherry Orchard
|Mme. Lyubov Andreyeyna Ranevsky
|
|-
|1965
|Theatre 625
|Rebecca West
|Episode: Rosmersholm<br>
|-
|1965
|The Wars of the Roses
|Margaret of Anjou
|
|-
|1966
|ITV Play of the Week
|Mrs. Patrick Campbell
|Episode: Dear Liar
|-
| 1967
| The Wednesday Play: Days in the Trees
|The Mother
|Guest Star
|-
|1968
|From Chekhov with Love
|Olga Knipper
|TV film
|-
|1972
|ITV Sunday Night Theatre
|Sonya
|Episode: The Last Journey
|-
|1976
|Arena
|Winnie
|Episode: Theatre, TV Series Documentary
|-
| 1978
| Hullabaloo Over Georgie and Bonnie's Pictures
|Lady G
|
|-
| 1978
| Edward & Mrs. Simpson
| Queen Mary
|
|-
| rowspan=3|1980
| Caught on a Train
| Frau Messner
|
|-
| 1989
| Screen One: She's Been Away
| Lillian Huckle
| Venice Film Festival – Golden Ciak Award for Best Actress<br>Venice Film Festival – Pasinetti Award for Best Actress
|-
|1990
|Murder by the Book
|Agatha Christie
|
|}
Radio
- Romeo and Juliet (BBC Light Programme 1954)
- The Duchess of Malfi BBC Third Programme (1954)
- Henrik Ibsen's Hedda Gabbler (BBC HS 1957)
- Macbeth BBC Third Programme (1966)
- Noël Coward's Hay Fever (BBC R4 1971)
- Family Voices BBC Radio 3 (1981)
- Chances BBC Radio 3 (1981)
- Anthony Minghella's A Little Like Drowning (BBC R4 1989-03-20)
- In the Native State BBC Radio 3 (1991) ===
- Much Ado about Nothing (with John Gielgud) (Marlowe Dramatic Society)
- The Winter's Tale (with John Gielgud) (Caedmon Records)
- The Taming of the Shrew (Marlowe Dramatic Society)
- The Merchant of Venice (abridged) (Living Shakespeare)
- The Wife of Bath's Tale (Caedmon Records)
- The Rape of the Lock (Argo)
- The Shaw-Terry Letters (with Cyril Cusack) (Caedmon Record<nowiki/>s)
- The World of Peggy Ashcroft and John Gielgud (includes excerpts from Much Ado about Nothing, Richard II, Henry V, 3 Henry VI, Othello, King Lear, The Tempest and Shakespeare's sonnets) (Argo)
- Two recordings of Edith Sitwell and William Walton's Façade - with Paul Scofield conducted by Walton for Argo, and with Jeremy Irons conducted by Riccardo Chailly for Decca
Notes, references and sources
Notes
References
Sources
See also
- List of Academy Award winners and nominees from Great Britain
- List of Golden Globe winners
- List of Royal National Theatre Company actors
- List of actors in Royal Shakespeare Company productions
- List of Primetime Emmy Award winners