Ashcroft, Dame Peggy

Ashcroft, Dame Peggy [ Edith Margaret Emily Ashcroft] (1907–91), English actress, one of the foremost of her generation. She made her début in 1926 at the Birmingham Repertory Theatre, as Margaret in Barrie's Dear Brutus, and first attracted attention in London in 1929, playing Naemi in Feuchtwanger's Jew Süss with the simplicity and sense of poetic tragedy that made so many of her later performances remarkable. After enhancing her reputation with an excellent Desdemona to Paul Robeson's Othello in 1930, she joined the company at the Old Vic in 1932, playing 10 major roles in eight months, among them Rosalind, Perdita, and Imogen in Shakespeare, of whose women she was always to be the perfect exponent, as well as Cleopatra in Shaw's Caesar and Cleopatra. Much of her best work was done in conjunction with Gielgud; she played Juliet to his Romeo in 1935, and Ophelia to his Hamlet and Titania to his Oberon in 1944–5. Apart from Shakespeare, she was outstanding as Nina to Gielgud's Trigorin in Chekhov's The Seagull in 1936— and in 1964 played Arkadina with no less mastery of her art—and under his direction played one of her best comedy parts, Cecily Cardew in Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest, in 1939. In 1950 she was with Gielgud again, playing Beatrice to his Benedict and Cordelia to his Lear at Stratford-upon-Avon, where she was later outstanding as Cleopatra to Michael Redgrave's Antony in 1953 and as Katharina in 1960. After the war she gave some outstanding performances in modern plays—Catherine Sloper in The Heiress in 1949, based on Henry James's novel Washington Square, Hester Collyer in Rattigan's The Deep Blue Sea in 1952, Miss Madrigal in Enid Bagnold's The Chalk Garden in 1956, and, with amazing versatility, the dual roles of the prostitute and her male cousin in the Royal Court production of Brecht's The Good Woman of Setzuan, also in 1956. Her Hedda Gabler in Ibsen's play in 1954 gained her the King's Medal from King Haakon of Norway. In 1961 Dame Peggy became a member of the RSC (of which she was later made a director), playing not only Margaret of Anjou from youth to old age in The Wars of the Roses in 1963 (see BARTON), but appearing in such new works as Marguerite Duras's Days in the Trees (1966) and Albee's A Delicate Balance (1969). In 1976, after being seen at the National Theatre in Ibsen's John Gabriel Borkman and Beckett's Happy Days, she returned to the RSC in Arbuzov's Old World. Her last stage role was the Countess of Rousillon in All's Well That Ends Well in 1981.