Edith Evans

Biography

Edith Evans strode across the English-speaking stage like a colossus for more than fifty years, her voice capable of rattling the gods in the balcony or hushing the house to a whisper. She first stepped before a paying audience in 1912 and never really left, conquering the West End, Broadway, Stratford’s Memorial Theatre and the Old Vic with equal authority. George VI tapped her shoulder with a damehood in 1946, long after critics had run out of superlatives. By the early sixties, Laurence Olivier noticed the steel trap of her memory beginning to rust; lines that once arrived like clockwork now occasionally hesitated. Rather than retreat, Evans simply tilted toward a new box of light. She had flirted with celluloid in 1915, then vanished from it for thirty-three years until Emlyn Williams lured her back to play the granite-hearted Welshwoman of *The Last Days of Dolwyn* (1949). A string of indelible screen turns followed: the malevolent countess in *The Queen of Spades* (1949), Lady Bracknell delivering the immortal handbag line in *The Importance of Being Earnest* (1952), the steely Mother Superior in Zinnemann’s *The Nun’s Story* (1959), and the querulous landlady in Richardson’s *Look Back in Anger* (1959). Yet it was her lusty, scene-stealing Miss Western in Tony Richardson’s Oscar-laden *Tom Jones* (1963) that announced to the world what London had known for decades—great acting transcends medium. The part earned her first Academy nomination at seventy-five. Twelve months later she collected a second for the emotionally armoured grandmother of *The Chalk Garden* (1964). Her crowning cinema triumph arrived in 1967: the frightened, half-mad recluse of Bryan Forbes’s *The Whisperers* brought her a Golden Globe, the New York Film Critics Circle prize, and a third Oscar bid. She lost the statue that April to Katharine Hepburn, buoyed by sympathy after Spencer Tracy’s death, but walked away with the audience’s hearts intact. Scripts of diminishing worth continued to arrive, yet even threadbare material glowed when Dame Edith wrapped her voice around it. She kept working until the final curtain, dying in her eighty-eighth year on 14 October 1976, her legend secure in footlights and film stock alike.