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. Ashcroft's father was killed on active service in the First World War. She attended Woodford School, East Croydon, where one of her teachers encouraged her love of Shakespeare, but neither her teachers nor her mother approved of her desire to become a professional actress. Ashcroft was determined, however, and at the age of 16, she enrolled at the Central School of Speech and Drama, run by Elsie Fogerty, from whom her mother had taken lessons some years before. The school's emphasis was on the voice and elegant diction, which did not appeal to Ashcroft or to her fellow pupil Laurence Olivier. She learned more from reading My Life in Art by Constantin Stanislavski, the influential director of the Moscow Art Theatre."Obituary: Dame Peggy Ashcroft", The Times, 15 June 1991, p. 14
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.Miller, p. 34 She graduated from the Central School in 1927 with London University's Diploma in Dramatic Art.Gaye, p. 314 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."Duke of York's Theatre", The Times, 20 September 1929, p. 12 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."Lyttelton and Hart-Davis, p. 24
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.Billington, Michael. "Near perfection in an imperfect world", The Guardian, 15 June 1991, p. 21 During the run she had a brief affair with Robeson, which caused Robeson and his wife Essie Robeson to temporarily split up.; cf. , Their affair, followed by another with the writer J. B. Priestley, ended Ashcroft's first marriage.; cf. ; cf. , Ziegler, p. 67 Hart-Davis was granted a divorce in 1933, on the grounds of Ashcroft's adultery with the director Theodore Komisarjevsky."Probate, Divorce, and Admiralty Division", The Times, 11 May 1933. p. 4
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".Croall, p. 155 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."Morley, p. 85
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.Gilbert, p. 16 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.Morley, Sheridan and Robert Sharp. "Gielgud, Sir (Arthur) John (1904–2000)", Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, January 2011, retrieved 2 February 2014 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. In 1933 she made her first film, The Wandering Jew.Ashcroft, Dame Edith Margaret Emily, (Dame Peggy Ashcroft)", Who Was Who, online edition, Oxford University Press, 2014, retrieved 15 January 2015 She was not attracted to the medium of cinema and made only four more films over the next quarter-century.
During her professional and personal relationship with Komisarjevsky, whom she married in 1934 and left in 1936, Ashcroft learned from him what Billington calls "the vital importance of discipline, perfectionism, and the idea that the actor, even during passages of emotional stress, must remain a thinking human being".Billington, Michael. "Ashcroft, Dame Edith Margaret Emily (Peggy) (1907–1991)", Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2010, retrieved 15 January 2015
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.Croall, pp. 209–210 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.Morley, p. 133
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.
1940s and 1950s In 1940, Ashcroft met and married the rising lawyer Jeremy Hutchinson. They had a daughter, Eliza, the following year, and Ashcroft did little stage work while the child was young. Her main appearances during the war years were in Gielgud's company at the Haymarket Theatre in 1944, playing Ophelia in Hamlet, Titania in A Midsummer Night's Dream and the title role in The Duchess of Malfi. She won excellent notices, but the productions were thought to lack flair and were unfavourably compared with the exciting work of the rival Old Vic company under Richardson and Olivier's leadership."Haymarket Theatre", The Times, 14 October 1944, p. 2; 26 January 1945, p. 6; and 19 April 1945, p. 6 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.Donnelley, p. 44
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.
Ashcroft began the 1950s with a return to Shakespeare, at the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon, playing Beatrice to Gielgud's Benedick in Much Ado About Nothing and Cordelia to his King Lear. In 1951 she returned to the Old Vic, playing Viola in Twelfth Night, the title role in Electra and Mistress Page in The Merry Wives of Windsor. In the second of these, according to Billington, "she scaled the austere peaks of Greek tragedy".
Through the rest of the decade, Ashcroft's career switched between commercial productions in the West End and appearances in the nascent subsidised theatres in Shakespeare and experimental works. In the former she made a deep impression as the adulterous, suicidal Hester Collyer in Terence Rattigan's The Deep Blue Sea (1952) and was well reviewed as the governess Miss Madrigal in Enid Bagnold's The Chalk Garden (1956). Her roles for non-commercial managements were in Shakespeare at Stratford and on tour, Hedda Gabler (1954) and the double role of Shen Te and Shui Ta in The Good Woman of Setzuan (1956). The last of these was not a success, but Ashcroft was credited with courage for taking the role on.
In 1958, Peter Hall, who had been appointed to run the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre, approached Ashcroft with his plans for a permanent company, with bases in Stratford and London, and a regular, salaried company, presenting a mixture of classical and new plays. Ashcroft immediately agreed to join him, and her lead was, in Hall's view, key to the success of the new Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC).
1960s