Tandy, Jessica

Tandy, Jessica (1909–94), actress. The slim, sharp‐voiced leading lady was born in England and first appeared on Broadway in The Matriarch (1930). She made only occasional New York appearances thereafter until she won wide acclaim for her performance as Blanche DuBois in A Streetcar Named Desire (1947). Among her subsequent roles were the suicidal divorcée Hilda Crane (1950), the loving wife Agnes in The Fourposter (1951), the shy Mary Doyle courted by the Devil in Madam, Will You Walk? (1953), the troubled wife Agnes in A Delicate Balance (1966), the card‐playing senior citizen Fonsia Dorsey in The Gin Game (1977), the elderly backwoods widow Annie Nations in Foxfire (1982), and the liberal Lady Elizabeth Milne in The Petition (1984). Variety wrote of her performance in Foxfire, “Everything about the character, her confusion, simplicity, love of her husband and son, pride in her offstage grandchildren, is played with crystalline expressiveness and excitingly precise detail.” Tandy appeared with her husband, Hume Cronyn, in the last six plays. The couple performed reg‐ularly at major regional playhouses, most notably the Guthrie Theatre, where she assumed such diverse roles as Queen Gertrude, Madam Ranevskaya, and Linda in Death of a Salesman.