Tandy, Jessica

Tandy, Jessica (1909–94), American actress born in London, who began her stage career at the Birmingham Repertory Theatre in 1928, being seen briefly in London a year later before going to New York in 1930 to play in G. B. Stern's The Matriarch. On her return to London she appeared in a wide variety of plays, including Dodie Smith's Autumn Crocus (1931), Hamlet in 1934 as Ophelia opposite John Gielgud, and Rattigan's French without Tears (1936). After a season with the Old Vic company in 1937 she returned to New York to play Kay in the Broadway production of J. B. Priestley's Time and the Conways (1938), and in the 1940s she settled permanently in the USA. The role of Blanche Du Bois in Tennessee Williams's A Streetcar Named Desire (1947), which she played on Broadway for over two years, established her as one of America's leading actresses.

With her second husband Hume Cronyn she formed a notable stage partnership. Their early plays together included Jan de Hartog's two-character study of a marriage The Fourposter (1951) and N. C. Hunter's A Day by the Sea (1955). She appeared in Peter Shaffer's Five Finger Exercise (1959) and at the American Shakespeare Theatre in 1961, where she played Lady Macbeth, before joining her husband again in the London production of Hugh Wheeler's Big Fish, Little Fish (1962), and in the opening season at the Guthrie Theater, Minneapolis (1963), when she played Gertrude in Hamlet, Olga in Chekhov's Three Sisters, and Linda Loman in Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman. They returned to the Guthrie in 1965 and were also seen in the New York productions of Dürrenmatt's The Physicists (1964) and Albee's A Delicate Balance (1966). She starred independently in Tennessee Williams's Camino Real (1970) and Albee's All Over (1971), and continued her partnership with Cronyn in Beckett's Happy Days (1972) and the double bill Noël Coward in Two Keys (1974). They were both at the Stratford (Ontario) Festival in 1976, where she played Lady Wishfort in Congreve's The Way of the World and Hippolyta/Titania in A Midsummer Night's Dream. In New York (1977; London, 1979) they starred in another two-character play, D. L. Coburn's The Gin Game, set in an old people's home, and at Stratford (Ontario) she played Mary Tyrone in O'Neill's Long Day's Journey into Night in 1980. She was with Cronyn in Foxfire (1982), which he jointly adapted (with Susan Cooper) from books of folklore. She starred in a revival of Tennessee Williams's The Glass Menagerie in 1983, and in 1986 was with her husband in Brian Clark's The Petition, which again had only two characters.