Constance Cummings

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Cummings, Constance (1910– ), American-born actress, who made her New York début in 1928 in the chorus of the musical Treasure Girl. After her marriage to the English playwright Benn W(olfe) Levy (1900–73) she lived and worked mainly in England. She had roles in several of her husband's works, including the title-roles in Young Madame Conti (1936; NY, 1937), based on a play by Bruno Frank, and, in New York, Madame Bovary (1937), adapted from Flaubert's novel. She returned to London in 1938 to appear in James Hilton's Goodbye, Mr Chips, following it with Levy's production of his own play The Jealous God (1939). Later in the same year, for the Old Vic, she showed great poise and emotional power as Juliet and as Shaw's St Joan. She was seen in the London production of Robert Sherwood's The Petrified Forest (1942) and in new plays by Levy such as The Rape of the Belt (1957). In 1964 she successfully took over from Uta Hagen the role of Martha in Albee's Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? in London, and in 1969 she played Gertrude in Hamlet in both London and New York. In 1971 she joined the company of the National Theatre, where she gave a superb performance as the drug-addicted Mary Tyrone in O'Neill's Long Day's Journey into Night, and was also much admired as Ranevskaya in Chekhov's The Cherry Orchard. She went to the Royal Court Theatre to appear with Michael Hordern in Howard Barker's Stripwell (1975), and was highly praised for her performance (mainly a monologue) as a woman recovering from a stroke in Arthur Kopit's Wings (NY and NT, 1979).